Columbia Climate School's Office of Faculty Affairs is pleased to announce that Jyoti Singh will deliver our September research seminar, “From Extreme Rainfall to Crop Losses: Understanding Waterlogging Risk Across Scales,” on Thursday, September 10, from 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM in Hogan Hall A-level Conference Room, at 2910 Broadway.
If joining on Zoom, RSVP here. You will receive the Zoom link the day before the event. If you cannot access this link, please email [email protected] to be added to the Zoom list. Light refreshments will be served.
Abstract: Waterlogging occurs when prolonged soil saturation deprives plant roots of oxygen, disrupting growth and yield. It affects croplands worldwide and is expected to worsen as extreme rainfall intensifies. In 2019, excessive wetness left over 7.6 million hectares unplanted in the U.S. Midwest Corn Belt. Although wet extremes can cause yield losses comparable to drought, waterlogging remains poorly represented in climate-impact assessments. Global crop models sometimes simulate little damage, or even yield gains, in wet years when observed yields declined. This talk traces the problem from experiments to regional simulations and global assessment. We synthesized maize waterlogging experiments worldwide to determine how stress timing and duration affect roots, canopy, biomass, and yield, then translated this evidence into crop-model processes. After evaluation against controlled experiments, we simulated real-world waterlogging responses across multiple Midwest Corn Belt sites. Results show that accurately detecting waterlogging onset and duration is essential for reproducing observed crop losses. Analysis of model processes and outputs also reveals how soil data and drainage assumptions shape risk estimates. Building on these findings, we are developing a protocol with crop-modeling teams for a global multi-model assessment to identify waterlogging hotspots, explain differences among projections, and improve crop-risk estimates under historical and future climates.
Bio: Jyoti Singh is a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Columbia University’s Center for Climate Systems Research, based at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Her research examines how climate change and extreme events affect crops and food systems from regional to global scales. She combines climate data, experimental evidence, and process-based crop models to understand crop responses to waterlogging, ozone, heat, and changes in temperature, precipitation, and radiation. Her broader work connects climate-risk assessment with agricultural resilience, food security, and adaptation in climate-vulnerable farming regions. Before joining Columbia, Singh was a Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University, where she worked on improving crop processes in a global land model. She received her PhD in Atmospheric Sciences from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, and masters in Remote Sensing and GIS from the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, ISRO.
