Delay in timing and spatial reorganization of rainfall due to urbanization- analysis over India’s smart city Bhubaneswar

Abstract

Bhubaneswar is the first designed ‘smart city’ in India and has experienced rapid urbanization since 2000. The question undertaken in this study is to assess if there is a change in the rainfall over this rapidly urbanizing region, and if so, what are the characteristics of the change? The broader intent is to understand if the change in urbanization and rainfall are interlinked? The India Meteorological Department (hourly station and daily gridded) and Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (3-hourly) datasets are analyzed for the 1980–2018 period (39 years) for different seasons separately. Wavelet and trend analysis reveal that precipitation intensity has increased over the study period. The assessments of the hourly rainfall data show an interesting feature. There is a decrease in the midnight to early-morning rain, with a corresponding increase in the late-afternoon to midnight rainfall. The increase in the rainfall is preferentially downwind and on the east side of the city. A supervised classified land use land cover map of the Bhubaneswar region is developed for 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2019 using Landsat imagery to compute the urban sprawl. The urban area and population density over Bhubaneswar is increasing with time. Analysis of the LULC and rainfall data indicates that the rainfall over urban regions and the shift in the timing of rains to evenings is highly correlated with the urban sprawl.