His past research includes forage and rangeland management, remote sensing, water resources management, and greenhouse gas emissions in the Southern Great Plains. Specific research areas include but not limited to greenhouse gases monitoring and modeling, regional evapotranspiration (ET) mapping, eddy covariance, and hydrologic and crop modeling. Some of the past research projects include crop modeling with DSSAT, developing and managing a network of greenhouse measurement systems, ET-SWAT-MODFLOW linkage for groundwater management, development and evaluation of remote sensing based surface energy balance models, energy balance closure problem with eddy covariance systems, development of ET mapping and reference ET software for operational ET remote sensing programs and irrigation scheduling, calibration and validation of hydrologic and crop models and revising their irrigation and yield estimation algorithms, and application of ET, hydrologic and crop models for developing and evaluating agricultural management practices that are resilient to climate extremes. Dr. Gowda has authored/co-authored more than 550 technical publications including 230 articles in national or international refereed journals. In 2015, Dr. Gowda received a mentoring award from the tri-societies for his effort that encouraged women in agricultural sciences. He is the Fellow of the American Society of Agronomy (ASA) and the Soil Science Society of America (SSSA).