Binod Parajuli - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Binod Parajuli

International Journal of Mass Emergencies & Disasters

The 25 April 7.8 magnitude Gorkha earthquake and subsequent aftershocks, including the 7.3 magnit... more The 25 April 7.8 magnitude Gorkha earthquake and subsequent aftershocks, including the 7.3 magnitude earthquake in Dolakha, severely damaged or destroyed nearly 900,000 buildings and approximately 2.3 million people continue to be displaced. We conducted 284 household surveys in 177 shelter sites spanning 27 Municipalities/VDCs and 7 districts. The aim of the survey was to analyze the shelter response situation in both urban and rural areas with a view on emerging factors influencing the decision processes of displaced households seeking shelter and temporary housing. It was found that in-place sheltering close to damaged homes was favored by many residents in both urban and rural areas as many preferred to stay close to their homes, food reserves, livelihoods and social ties. The experience from this event shows that spontaneous sheltering behavior and participatory management of these sites should be accommodated and supported in the shelter response strategy.

Journal of Hydrologic Engineering

AbstractContinuous streamflow prediction is crucial in many applications of water resources plann... more AbstractContinuous streamflow prediction is crucial in many applications of water resources planning and management. However, streamflow prediction is challenging, particularly in data-scarce regio...

AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts, Dec 1, 2020

Impact of Climate Change, Land Use and Land Cover, and Socio-economic Dynamics on Landslides, 2022

Strong earthquakes cause transient perturbations of the near Earth's surface system. These in... more Strong earthquakes cause transient perturbations of the near Earth's surface system. These include the widespread landsliding and subsequent mass movement and the loading of rivers with sediments. In addition, rock mass is shattered during the event, forming cracks that affect rock strength and hydrological conductivity. Often overlooked in the immediate aftermath of an earthquake, these perturbations can represent a major part of the overall disaster with an impact that can last for years before restoring to background conditions. Thus, the relaxation phase is part of the seismically induced change by an earthquake and needs to be monitored in order to understand the full impact of earthquakes on the Earth system. Early June 2015, shortly after the April 2015 Mw7.9 Gorkha earthquake, we installed an array of 12 seismometers and geophones and 6 weather stations in the upper Bhotekoshi catchment, covering an area of ~50 km2. The seismic network was optimized for the monitoring of...

Earth, 2021

Streamflow and sediment flux variations in a mountain river basin directly affect the downstream ... more Streamflow and sediment flux variations in a mountain river basin directly affect the downstream biodiversity and ecological processes. Precipitation is expected to be one of the main drivers of these variations in the Himalayas. However, such relations have not been explored for the mountain river basin, Nepal. This paper explores the variation in streamflow and sediment flux from 2006 to 2019 in central Nepal’s Kali Gandaki River basin and correlates them to precipitation indices computed from 77 stations across the basin. Nine precipitation indices and four other ratio-based indices are used for comparison. Percentage contributions of maximum 1-day, consecutive 3-day, 5-day and 7-day precipitation to the annual precipitation provide information on the severity of precipitation extremeness. We found that maximum suspended sediment concentration had a significant positive correlation with the maximum consecutive 3-day precipitation. In contrast, average suspended sediment concentra...

International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 2021

Abstract Over the last decade, several flood early warning systems have been established in Nepal... more Abstract Over the last decade, several flood early warning systems have been established in Nepal, helping reduce the number of people affected and killed by floods. However, there are still challenges in communicating flood warning to the most vulnerable. The unavailability of real-time monitoring in smaller streams and tributaries has created challenges for communicating early warning. The ongoing restructuring process of the multilevel governance system in the country also presents challenges, specifically institutional such as insufficient coordination among relevant agencies, lack of adequate personnel, limited budget, and unclear roles and responsibilities. This study uses the Alexander framework (2015) to identify gaps in flood early warning communication in relation to their technical, institutional and socio-cultural components. Qualitative research methods in the form of key informant interviews and on-site focus group discussions were conducted at the national, district and local levels to collect data, taking Ratu watershed as a case study. Based on our analysis, we conclude that, first, while progress has been made in the monitoring and forecasting of floods, integration of socio-cultural aspects that can make early warning information accessible to the most vulnerable has to be strengthened. Second, warning messages need to be co-designed with communities and tailored to meet their diverse needs for proper dissemination and timely protective action. Finally, for flood risk communication to bridge ‘the last mile’ in terms of reaching the most vulnerable in the community must take account of their distinct social, economic and political experiences in both content and delivery of the information.

arXiv: Applications, 2020

Extreme floods provide a design basis for flood-sensitive infrastructures. There is strong eviden... more Extreme floods provide a design basis for flood-sensitive infrastructures. There is strong evidence of climate change to alter the characteristics of extreme floods in the central Himalayan region, Nepal. However, current infrastructure design practices rely on the assumption of stationary flood peak records. Given the nonstationary behavior in extreme floods, traditional infrastructure design specifications may yield poor outcomes. Here we show that assuming climate stationarity can drastically underestimate extreme floods. We find that the uncertainty in extreme flood estimates is driven by complex interaction between uncertainties associated with data record length, model priors and model structures. Our results highlight the importance of incorporating climate nonstationarity into extreme flood estimates, and are of practical use for keeping infrastructure reliable over the service life.

Forecasting, 2020

Improving decision-making in various areas of water policy and management (e.g., flood and drough... more Improving decision-making in various areas of water policy and management (e.g., flood and drought preparedness, reservoir operation and hydropower generation) requires skillful streamflow forecasts. Despite the recent advances in hydrometeorological prediction, real-time streamflow forecasting over the Himalayas remains a critical issue and challenge, especially with complex basin physiography, shifting weather patterns and sparse and biased in-situ hydrometeorological monitoring data. In this study, we demonstrate the utility of low-complexity data-driven persistence-based approaches for skillful streamflow forecasting in the Himalayan country Nepal. The selected approaches are: (1) simple persistence, (2) streamflow climatology and (3) anomaly persistence. We generated the streamflow forecasts for 65 stream gauge stations across Nepal for short-to-medium range forecast lead times (1 to 12 days). The selected gauge stations were monitored by the Department of Hydrology and Meteoro...

Sciences in Cold and Arid Regions, 2021

Flood is common global disaster and downstream community is at increased risk due to it. Flood ri... more Flood is common global disaster and downstream community is at increased risk due to it. Flood risk communication is therefore important to decrease potential flood risk events and help community to adapt and mitigate the risk. The study is transboundary one form Nepal to West Champaran, Bihar and hence focused to identify information dissemination at the national, district and local level to the community level and advise the possible efficient way of flood information dissemination based on combined work of policy review and field work. Institutional mapping along with schedule survey, KII and FGD were performed for data collection. Studies reveal that there are many gaps and challenges at different level as the messages passes from upper level to lower through different mediums. Also, it was found that official flood risk communication strategies in both of the countries adopted "top-down" approach of communication with low community participation. Most of the agencies...

Natural Hazards, 2021

The Hindu Kush Himalayan region is extremely susceptible to periodic monsoon floods. Early warnin... more The Hindu Kush Himalayan region is extremely susceptible to periodic monsoon floods. Early warning systems with the ability to predict floods in advance can benefit tens of millions of people living in the region. Two web-based flood forecasting tools (ECMWF-SPT and HIWAT-SPT) are therefore developed and deployed jointly by SERVIR-HKH and NASA-AST to provide early warning to Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Nepal. ECMWF-SPT provides ensemble forecast up to 15-day lead time, whereas HIWAT-SPT provides deterministic forecast up to 3-day lead time covering almost 100% of the rivers. Hydrological models in conjunction with forecast validation contribute not only to advancing the processes of a forecasting system, but also objectively assess the joint distribution of forecasts and observations in quantifying forecast accuracy. The validation of forecast products has emerged as a priority need to evaluate the worth of the predictive information in terms of quality and consistency. This paper descr...

Theoretical and Applied Climatology, 2016

Extreme climate index is one of the useful tools to monitor and detect climate change. The primar... more Extreme climate index is one of the useful tools to monitor and detect climate change. The primary objective of this study is to provide a more comprehensively the changes in extreme precipitation between the periods of 1954-1983 and 1984-2013 in Shaanxi province under climate change, which will hopefully provide a scientific understanding of the precipitation-related natural hazards such as flood and drought. Daily precipitation from 34 surface meteorological stations were used to calculated 13 extreme precipitation indices (EPIs) generated by the joint World Meteorological Organization Commission for Climatology (CCI)/World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) project on Climate Variability and Predictability (CLIVAR) expect Team on climate change Detection, Monitoring and Indices (ETCCDMI). Two periods including 1954-1983 and 1984-2013 were selected and five types of precipitation days (R10mm-R100mm) were defined, to provide more evidences of climate change impacts on the extreme precipitation events, and specially, to investigate the changes in different types of precipitation days. The EPIs were generated using RClimRex software, and the trends were analyzed using Mann-Kendall nonparametric test and Sen's slope estimator. The relationships between the EPIs and the impacts of climate anomalies on typical EPIs were investigated using correlation and composite analysis. The mainly results include: 1) Thirteen EPIs, except consecutive dry day (CDD), were positive trends dominated for the period of 1984-2013, but the trends were not obvious for the period of 1954-1983. Most of the trends were not statistically significant at 5 % significance level. 2) The spatial distributions of stations that exhibited positive and negative trends were scattered. However, the stations that had negative trends mainly distributed in the north of Shaanxi province, and the stations that had positive trends mainly located in the south. 3) The percentage of stations that had positive trends had increased from the period of 1954-1983 to 1984-2013 for all the 13 EPIs except CDD, indicating the possible climate change impacts on extreme precipitation events. 4) The correlations between annual total wet-day precipitation (PRCPTOT) and other 12 EPIs varied for different indices and stations. The composite analysis found that El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) exerted greater impacts on PRCPTOT than other EPIs and greater in the Guanzhong Plain (GZP) than Qinling-Dabashan Mountains (QDM) and Shanbei Plateau (SBP) of Shaanxi province.

Measurement, 2017

An inter-comparison of precipitation data of manual and automatic precipitation gauge was carried... more An inter-comparison of precipitation data of manual and automatic precipitation gauge was carried out for four stations of Nepal for the period of 2011-2014. Manual recorded precipitation is used as reference to calculate deviation for automatic recording. This study has attempted to quantify and understand the differences in precipitation amounts between manual and automatic recording. In addition, the possible causes behind the disparity of automatic and manual observational data are also discussed. In case of selected stations, the data quality is fairly satisfactory. The daily deviation between manual recorded and 24 h aggregated automatic recorded precipitation data are calculated for only those days when both gauges are functional. In normal operation the automatic recorded precipitation is underestimated on an average of 10% compared to manual recorded precipitation. The minimum of 5 years of overlapping data still seems to be low for the developing countries like Nepal where timely maintenance, calibration, and up keeping is not possible.

Weather, 2021

Extreme rainfall is one of the major causes of natural hazards (for example flood, landslide, and... more Extreme rainfall is one of the major causes of natural hazards (for example flood, landslide, and debris flow) in the central Himalayan region, Nepal. The performance of strategies to manage these risks relies on the accuracy of quantitative rainfall estimates. Rain gauges have traditionally been used to measure the amount of rainfall at a given location. The point measurement often misrepresents the basin estimates, because of limited density and high spatial variability of rainfall fields across the Himalayas. The Department of Hydrology and Meteorology (DHM), Nepal has planned to install a network of three weather radars that cover the entire country. So far, the first weather radar has been installed in 2019 in the western region of the country. Two more radars will be added for the planned radar network in the near future covering the central and eastern regions of the country. Here we introduce the first installed weather radar in Nepal. We highlight both the opportunities and challenges with the radar observation in the mountainous regions. Radar rainfall estimates across the Himalayas are critical to issue severe weather warnings; forecast floods and landslides; and inform decision making in a broad range of sectors, including water and energy, construction, transportation, and agriculture.