[1] He is known for his studies on atmospheric convective processes and air-sea interactions[2] and is an elected fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences.
His career started as a scientific assistant at IISc and he has been serving the institute where he holds the chair of the Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences since 2006.
[8] He served as the principal investigator of the Bay of Bengal Monsoon Experiment (BOBMEX), a segment of the Indian Climate Research Programme (ICRP), in 1999;[9] the details of his experiments are available in a number of articles published by the Indian Academy of Sciences.
[10] He has also delivered plenary and invited speeches including the talk on Air-sea interaction over the North Indian Ocean at Massachusetts Institute of Technology on 10 April 2012.
[11] Bhat, who won the P. S. Narayan Medal and the Sabita Choudhuri Medal, both for the best doctoral thesis, in 1990, received the PRL Award for innovative theoretical and/or experimental studies in Earth and Planetary Sciences of the Physical Research Laboratory in 2001.