Emerging Extreme Heat in Rapidly Growing Indian Cities

This research on Emerging Extreme Heat in Rapidly Growing Indian Cities is funded by NASA Land-Cover and Land-Use Change (LCLUC) Program. 

The primary problem we are responding to through this research is on global estimates of heat exposures, which underestimate the risk to urban residents due to high thermal variability within cities. Therefore, there is an urgent need of characterizing where urban growth and extreme heat emergence intersects at scales of 50m.

KEY SCIENCE  QUESTIONS:

1. What is the impact of heatwaves (large-scale advective driven) versus the urban heat island (local-scale convective driven) on the intra-urban thermal footprint of each city?

2. From city growth over the past decade (from 2013-2023), where does rapid urban growth and extreme heat emergence intersect in each of the cities?

3. What are the dominant thermal properties of different urban LCLU classes that contribute to the day and nighttime surface urban heat island effect?

EARTH OBSERVATION DATA USED: This study will rely on using TIR data from VIIRS, Landsat and ECOSTRESS to map the summertime as well as heatwave scenario LSTs of the selected Indian cities. These data will be used in combination with VSWIR data from Landsat for urban LCLUC mapping and quantify connections between emerging heat and urban growth over the last decade (2013-2023 and onward). The proposed work advances the Multi-Source Land Imaging (MuSLI) of the LCLUC program by combining TIR and optical data described above.

IMPACT: Better understanding the total urban warming trajectories will help cities to identify regions where locally tailored adaptation measures are most needed to mitigate heat risk.