Land Use Change and Urban Impermeability in Dibrugarh City, Assam

Abstract

This study is an attempt to assess the impermeable surfaces in the Dibrugarh municipal area with the help of land use change analysis. The Dibrugarh municipal area, which comprises only 15.44 sq. km, is not suitable for land use change detection using freely available satellite images such as Landsat or Sentinel images, which have very low spatial resolution compared to the study area. Buying higher-resolution satellite images from Planet Labs, Airbus, or Maxar is quite expensive and cannot be accessed easily due to security reasons. On the other hand, Google Earth images, which are freely available and provide clear views of buildings and roads, can be easily used for on-screen digitization and hence utilized in this study for land use change detection, as they also provide historical images. The study revealed that built-up areas have increased by 10.13 percent from 2013 to 2023, which also increases the runoff coefficient from 0.54 to 0.61, making the city more vulnerable to flooding.