Key Points
Urbanisation has led to an overall 60 per cent increase in warming in Indian cities, a study by IIT Bhubaneswar revealed...
The study, titled Urbanization and regional climate change-linked warming of Indian Cities, published in the journal Nature Cities, analysed temperature data from several decades and correlated it with urban expansion metrics...
A total of 141 cities in India were chosen for this study and the contribution of local urbanisation and climate change were monitored using satellite images from NASA and other agencies...
Professor Dr V Vinoj from IIT Bhubaneswar, who is the co-author of the study, said, "On a longer timescale, Delhi's temperature change of about 30 to 35 per cent is due to urbanisation..
"The changed urban landscape no longer benefits from evaporative cooling, but accumulates heat due to factors such as higher-thermal-inertia surfaces (for example, concrete and asphalt), modified convection efficiency and surface albedo, and enhanced anthropogenic activity, thus leading to the well-known urban heat island (UHI) effect, which subsequently affects other climate parameters (rainfall, pollution and so on)," he said...
