Dominant control of agriculture and irrigation on urban heat island in India.
Abstract
As is true in many regions, India experiences surface Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect
that is well understood, but the causes of the more recently discovered Urban Cool
Island (UCI) effect remain poorly constrained. This raises questions about our fundamental
understanding of the drivers of rural-urban environmental gradients and hinders development
of effective strategies for mitigation and adaptation to projected heat stress increases
in rapidly urbanizing India. Here we show that more than 60% of Indian urban areas
are observed to experience a day-time UCI. We use satellite observations and the Community
Land Model (CLM) to identify the impact of irrigation and prove for the first time
that UCI is caused by lack of vegetation and moisture in non-urban areas relative
to cities. In contrast, urban areas in extensively irrigated landscapes generally
experience the expected positive UHI effect. At night, UHI warming intensifies, occurring
across a majority (90%) of India's urban areas. The magnitude of rural-urban temperature
contrasts is largely controlled by agriculture and moisture availability from irrigation,
but further analysis of model results indicate an important role for atmospheric aerosols.
Thus both land-use decisions and aerosols are important factors governing, modulating,
and even reversing the expected urban-rural temperature gradients.
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Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/15808Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1038/s41598-017-14213-2Publication Info
Kumar, Rahul; Mishra, Vimal; Buzan, Jonathan; Kumar, Rohini; Shindell, Drew; & Huber,
Matthew (2017). Dominant control of agriculture and irrigation on urban heat island in India. Sci Rep, 7(1). pp. 14054. 10.1038/s41598-017-14213-2. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/15808.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Drew Todd Shindell
Nicholas Distinguished Professor of Earth Science
Drew Shindell is Nicholas Professor of Earth Science at Duke University. From 1995
to 2014 he was at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City and
taught at Columbia University. He earned his Bachelor's at UC Berkeley and PhD at
Stony Brook University, both in Physics. He studies climate change, air quality, and
links between science and policy. He has been an author on >250 peer-reviewed publications,
received awards from Scientific American, NASA, the NSF and the EPA,

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