Executive Summary : | The massive increase in the concrete jungle is leading to change in urban microclimate, and formation of Urban Heat Islands (UHI). The formation of UHI takes place because large amount of solar radiation is absorbed by the urban artificial surfaces in the daytime, these surfaces undergo nocturnal irradiative cooling, thus retarding the rate of decrease in air temperature, whereas in rural areas nocturnal cooling occurs more rapidly. This difference in surface energy balance causes a marked difference between urban and rural temperature and results in formation of UHI. In past, the formation, driving factors and types of UHI has been studied by Oke (1973), Voogt and Oke (2003), Sakakibara and Matsui (2005), Hoffmann et al. (2012) and others. The techniques of estimation of UHI and its intensity have been carried out by Lowry (1977), Shigeta et al. (2009), Zhang et al. (2014). Researchers (Sarrat et. al., 2006; Davies et al 2007; Lai and Cheng, 2010; Sarkar and Ridder, 2011) have been studied the different characteristics of UHI and its impacts. The study of UHI over India is carried out by Mohan (2011), Patki and Alange (2013), Ghosh and Mukhopadhayay (2014), Ashraf (2015), Swain et al. (2016), Shashtri et. al. (2017), Kumar et. al., (2017), Barat et al (2018) and others. Shashtri et. al. (2017) worked on UHI using the date of Aqua-MODIS data and followed the methodology given by Peng(2012). The study of UHI around the globe is done by Georgescu et. al (2011), Peng et al (2012), Hu et. al. (2014), Lokoshchenko and Korneva (2015), Bahi et al. (2016), Sheng et al (2017), and others. In India, major cities are source of pollution to the river Ganga and these cities/towns has gone through rapid rate of urbanisation, which in turn makes these cities vulnerable to perturbation in urban meteorology. The major Cities/Towns of the Gangetic Plains including states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal are growing at a high pace and experiencing associated perturbation in micro/meso scale climate may lead to change in temperature and change in precipitation pattern. In recent years, a gradient in temperature (night time as well as daytime) is being observed at local and fine spatial scales, especially in urban areas the phenomenon is commonly referred as Urban Heat Island (UHI) which is influencing local weather and climate, propagation of air borne disease, health hazards, longer and extreme heat waves, heat related illness and poor air quality. Therefore, the proposed research problem will try to fill the void in the current understanding of evolution and current development of UHI over the Gangetic plains by taking even the smaller towns into account, so in this current research proposal, it is aimed to study UHI over the Gangetic plain of India and find possible linkage with the Aerosol Optical Depth and Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) such as temperature, precipitation, water vapour. |