Geological Behaviours in Urban Areas for Surface Runoff and Recharge

Abstract

Urbanization is rapidly growing all over the world affecting life styles and environment to a large scale. The most challenging impacts that can be observed are the reducing water levels and increasing surface flows in form of flash floods. Urban sprawl has converted hectares of agriculture and forest land into developed surfaces which have zero infiltration resulting in increased flow of precipitation. Apart from sealed land surfaces, the ignorance of soil behavior also leads to added surface flows and unnatural infiltration into soil. Incompatibility of urban planning and functions with the natural environment is becoming vast. Changes in land patterns due to Build up, pavements, roads and similar land cover affect surface water flow seriously. Wise use of modern means and best technologies available are not in use resulting in a huge gap between basic knowledge of natural processes and its requirement for balanced development having minimum impact on water recharge. Present paper is a research on various soil groups and urban water sheds for impacts of increasing Build up on runoff and behavior of soil under developed conditions. The method adopted was to analyze Build up from 1971 to 2014 using ArcGis 9.3 and hydrological modeling using SWMM software for resulting runoff in 40 years of urbanization. Results were compared for different soil groups to observe best conditions for suitable Build up on soil groups for sustainable development.