Sulochana Gadgil

Sulochana Gadgil (1944 – 24 July 2025) was an Indian meteorologist who retired as Professor from the Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (CAOS) in Bangalore, India. She studied the how and why of monsoons, including farming strategies to cope with rainfall variability and modelling ecological and evolutionary phenomena. Her research led to the discovery of a basic feature of the sub-seasonal variation in the monsoon cloud bands.

She demonstrated that the monsoon is not a gigantic land-sea breeze but instead is a manifestation of the seasonal migration of a planetary-scale system which is seen over non-monsoonal regions as well. In collaboration with the farmers she derived farming strategies which are tailored to the rainfall variability of different regions in India.

Early life and education She obtained her BSc (1963) and MSc (1965) in Mathematics from the University of Pune and a PhD (1970) in Applied Mathematics from Harvard. She had also been a post-doctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1970–71).

Awards and honours Gadgil is a recipient of Vikram Sarabhai Award, Norman Borlaug Award and Astronautical Society Award. She was conferred on the Life Time Achievement Award by the Ministry of Earth Sciences (2008). She is a Fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences Bangalore and Indian Meteorological Society.