Sara Nowreen

• PhD in Groundwater
• Professor at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology

The use of Sentinel-2 images to compute Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) has many applications, including water body area detection. However, cloud cover poses significant challenges in this regard, which hampers the effectiveness of Sentinel-2 images in this context. In this paper, we present a deep learning model that can generate NDWI gi...

Springshed management across mountainous states, such as India and Nepal, has paved the way for the groundwater recharge process. In contrast, despite introducing several interventions, the Bangladeshi government has never been officially exposed to such sustainable ideas for a spring revival. Therefore, this study aims to diagnose water security f...

Frequent floods and river erosions, exacerbated by global climate change, are causing miseries to millions of people worldwide. Thousands of citizens in Bangladesh become homeless every year due to recurrent floods and river erosions. This study reveals an unusual fact that the inhabitants of the Jamuna river floodplain are choosing immobility over...

Dhaka, the capital metropolis of Bangladesh, is burdened with huge population and unplanned urbanization. It is facing huge challenge to provide city-wide water connection due to the declination of groundwater resources, pollution of surface water sources, and poor governance. The low-income communities (LICs) in the city suffer the most due to the...

The rapid expansion of slums with increasing population density are the main barriers to scaling-up sustainable Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) facilities in the megalopolis of Dhaka, Bangladesh. The improper arrangement of ‘Cheap WASH’ (i.e., water access, sanitation access, and hygiene practices) and unmanaged disposal of non-biodegradable...

Global food security depends on the sustainability of irrigated agriculture. Rising groundwater withdrawals from seasonally humid, alluvial plains across tropical Asia have enabled dry-season rice cultivation. This groundwater pumpage increases available subsurface storage that under favorable conditions amplifies groundwater replenishment during t...

Rampant slum growths add more barriers to scaling up sustainable WASH facilities coupled with safe MHM amenities for megacities. On top of inequalities in accessing to WASH provision, MHM sensitivity to the needs of disabled girls or women is commonly denied. Low-income community case studies from the megalopolis of Dhaka, Bangladesh, capture multi...

Cities built on deltaic regions are always prone to environmental risks like aggravated flooding, wetland reduction, compromised water quality, continuing water scarcity, and tainted air and these have been remarkable as the challenges while urbanizing deltas. On top of that, rapid urbanization adds more to the deterioration of ecosystem functions....

The right to water entitles everyone to access sufficient, safe, acceptable, physically accessible, and affordable water for personal and domestic uses. Dhaka, a densely populated megacity in a lower-middle income countryis burdened with a great challenge of ensuring the right to water for its enormous population. Multiple issues like water dema...

In Bangladesh, groundwater is the main source of both drinking water and irrigation. Suction lift pumps and force mode of operation are the predominant technologies for groundwater abstraction in Bangladesh. For a sustainable usage policy, it is thus important to identify which technology would be more appropriate for which area in Bangladesh. With...

Various studies have described upon importance of the performance of multilevel slug tests to assess hydraulic conductivity of aquifer sediment. For this study, slug tests were performed at 33 locations in 107 numbers of observation wells under six physiographic divisions in the Bengal Basin, Bangladesh. The objective of this paper is to evaluate t...

Flood havoc during 2019 in the Sangu River basin caused widespread damage to residents, crops, roads, and communications in parts of hills in Bangladesh. Developing flood hazard maps can play an essential step in risks management. For this purpose, this study assessed 12 hydro‐geomorphological factors, namely, topographic wetness index, elevation,...

In Bangladesh two predominant pumping modes namely, Suction (S) and Force (F) are used for groundwater abstraction. Identifying which pumping mode would be apporopiate where in Bangladesh will help in formulating sustainable usage policy in Bangladesh. Therefore, this paper proposes a methodology leveraging the power of machine learning (ML) models...

The increasing trend of population growth along with the rapid groundwater-based agricultural expansion and decreasing trend of mean annual rainfall in the Northwest region of Bangladesh has been exacerbating the declination of groundwater for further expansion. Therefore, the present study attempts to demarcate the potential groundwater abstractio...

Groundwater is used intensively in Asian mega-deltas yet the processes by which groundwater is replenished in these deltaic systems remain inadequately understood. Drawing insight from hourly monitoring of groundwater levels and rainfall in two contrasting settings, comprising permeable surficial deposits of Holocene age and Plio-Pleistocene terrac...

Groundwater resources in Dhaka city have reached critical limits due to over-exploitation. Over-pumping of groundwater accompanied by lack of replenishment via infiltration have resulted in substantial declination of water-levels over the last two decades. Replenishment of groundwater using artificial recharge is therefore essential for proper mana...

Bangladesh is dependent upon groundwater to satisfy the enormous demand for domestic and agricultural water supplies. As reliable surface water resources have reduced significantly and the demand for water continues to rise there is an increase in groundwater reliance. In order to ensure future sustainability of groundwater supplies it is essential...

Explicit consideration of in-stream flow requirement (IFR) has now become almost mandatory in many rivers before irrigation withdrawal is made. Thereby, the primary objective was to evaluate the IFR through hydrological approaches and compare the condition with current flow variability and trends. Flow records were collected from five discharge sta...

Determining soil salinity within the delta is crucial as it is the dominant factor determining crop productivity. There are numerous interacting drivers that influence soil salinity, including climate variability, saline river water inundation, storm surge inundation, depth to groundwater table, groundwater salinity, and shrimp farming (Bagda). For...

Increasing concerns over managing river health, environmental sustainability and maintaining riverine ecosystems demand environmental flow estimation. In other words, off-stream water usage requires an in-depth analysis of the flow characteristics of the river concerned so that allocation of water for in-stream uses can be met. Drawing on discussio...

A comprehensible knowledge on the ground water (GW) recharge mechanism promises a better future prediction of highly dynamic shallow aquifer system in Bangladesh. However, due to the scarcity of data in the Bengal basin simplifications must be adopted in estimating groundwater recharge. Hence, a simplistic analytical approach of ground water rechar...

A landscape epidemiology modeling framework is presented which integrates the simulation outputs from an established spatial agent-based model (ABM) of malaria with a geographic information system (GIS). For a study area in Kenya, five landscape scenarios are constructed with varying coverage levels of two mosquito-control interventions. For each s...

Haors are large, round-shaped floodplain depressions located in the North-Eastern region of Bangladesh. Extreme events such as heavy rainfall routinely affect the haor basin with flash floods. These haors are predicted to experience severe stress because of changes in rainfall and temperature patterns. The biotic community of the wetlands may not h...

After more than a decade of meeting the designated objective of increasing productivity in agriculture, the South West coastal polders of Bangladesh have ended up as different man-made disasters. The failure of the polders to deliver the intended outcome is basically attributed to the lack of understanding of their hydro-morphological characteristi...

Massive polderization in the south west region of Bangladesh in 1960s initially showed an increase of agricultural productivity through protecting the monsoon crop (Aman) from saline water. However, since 1980s these polders have become a source of major environmental concern, including increased salinity. Additionally, the polders have caused grad...

Since 2000, the South West region of Bangladesh has been experiencing much more adverse effects of climate change like erratic rainfall, increasing temperature (0.06 °C/year), etc. The highest number consecutive dry days (83) and its highest increasing trend (3.2/year) at Mongla might have caused the monthly maximum salinity trends ranging from 124...

Considerable progress has been made for flood control, drainage and/or irrigation under the Small Scale Water Resources Development Sector Projects (SSWRDSP) of Local Government Engineering Department (LGED). However, this study conducted in the Mondolbari Drainage (MD) project, Tungipara, Gopalganj during 2008–2010 found that the project objective...