The Thane creek which houses two major commercial ports; Mumbai & Jawaharlal Nehru Ports faces periodic siltation problems. The maintenance dredging, carried out to keep navigational channel navigable, incurs high annual cost. A detailed understanding of the dominant processes causing morphological changes is required in tackling the problem of siltation.An attempt has been made to simulate the annual morphological change soccurring within Mumbai port limits, using a process-based hydrodynamic and morphological numerical model.

A team of scientists from five different institutions: National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT), Chennai Integrated Coastal and Marine Area Management Project Directorate (ICMAM PD), Chennai; National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), Goa; and National Central University (NCU), Taiwan led by IIT Bombay has successfully demonstrated the joint capabilities through a one-day field measurement campaign to estimate the nearshore dynamics along Pondicherry coast, located about 150 kms south of Chennai.

Tidal energy is one of the most promising resources of marine renewable energy. In India, Gulf of Khambhat, Gulf of Kutchh in Gujarat state and delta of Ganga in Sunderbans, West Bengal state are potential sites for generating tidal power. The aim of the research study is to estimate the tidal power potential along the Gulfs of Khambhat and Kutch. Two independent hydrodynamic models have been developed to estimate the spatial and temporal distributions of tidal energies in these Gulfs.

Hydrological studies in regions with sparse rain gauge networks are limited by the availability of rainfall data. Hence, a regionalisation approach becomes critical in modeling extreme events such as floods. A comprehensive framework is put forward for generating regionalised design rainfall time series, which can serve as a vital tool for data-scarce catchments prone to flood disasters. To demonstrate the framework, Jagatsinghpur district, a highly flood prone region in Odisha (India) is selected.

Indian summer monsoon rainfall (ISMR) is the major component of the Asian summer monsoon, which provides an 80% of the total annual rainfall in India, from June to September, which is critically important for agricultural productivity and GDP. However, global and local environmental changes are likely to introduce non-stationarity in the characteristics of ISMR extremes.

Urban populations (and the associated resource consumption) are one of the largest contributors to the global energy consumption and environmental impact. In India, there is continuous increase in urbanisation and almost 1/3 rd of the population is already staying in urbanised areas. With the challenges of global warming and other diverse environmental pressures on earth, it has become essential to decouple the growth from resource consumption such that there will be less pressure on the environment due to human activities.

It is evident in the history of life through time that diversification of biotic communities was driven by evolutionary innovations and environmental changes. The Earth’s climate passed through several episodes of greenhouse to icehouse conditions. Organisms responded differently to the climate change at regional and global scales. The Micropalaeontology Lab at IIT Bombay is pursuing research to understand how a unicellular, marine organism, called foraminifera, responded to climate change in the Cenozoic Era, the last 65 million years of the Earth’s history.

Alkalophile microbes are known to consume urea and form calcium carbonate. Only recently this ‘natural cement’ has been used to bond loose granular soil particles to improve their strength and solve other geotechnical issues such as increase liquefaction and earthquake resistance, reduce soil erosion and restore brown field sites. The success of this method depends upon the precise environment conditions for the organisms to secrete one or more of their metabolic products. The temperature and pH must be ‘just right’.

Restoration of a site previously prepared using dredged and waste clays from underground construction or tailing sludge, is a serious geotechnical problem. Much of these clays exist as lumps which ranges in size from a few tens of millimetres to a meter suspended in slurry, with poor engineering properties. This double porous material consolidates because of the expulsion of water from the voids between the lumps, as well as the voids within each lump. Due to this complex nature, the conventional theory of consolidation is not applicable to lumpy clay fills.

Calcium carbide residue (CCR) is a waste by-product of acetylene gas manufacturing industry. Because of its zero recovery value, the present Indian practice is to dump it in open land or landfills. This not only adversely impacts the volume of the landfill, but also reduces the biodegradation process of many other wastes because of its high alkali content. Hence to support the environment, it is necessity to develop means to reuse this industrial waste. This is the background of the study.