Impacts of Climate Variability on Urban Floods-A Case of Ahmedabad

Storm water management is an important urban infrastructure especially to increase resilience towards climate variability. Planning of the storm water infrastructure for urban areas is becoming more challenging with increase in urbanization and increase in sizes of the cities, especially for developing country like India. The authors here have studied the changing regime of temperature and rainfall patterns for Ahmedabad to understand the implications on storm water management. The analysis suggests increase in the rainfall intensity for the data period from 1901 to 2003. Also there has been substantial change in the coefficient of run off due to changing urban land cover estimated as per the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index. These changes put together have changed the nature of urban storm water management. The storm water management for cities like Ahmedabad would require new strategies for facing these challenges. It is important to integrate storm water management at planning level for the overall city as well as at local area levels.