Study Area

Hyderabad, the rapidly urbanizing city of Deccan plateau of India was chosen for the analysis. Presently Hyderabad is capital city for Telangana state and de facto capital for Andhra Pradesh after partition in the year 2014. Hyderabad lies on the banks of Musi River and surrounded by many water feeding lakes such as Osman sagar and Himayat sagar. With creation of special economic zones at Gachibowli, Pocharam, Manikonda etc. dedicated to information technology have encouraged companies from across India and around the world to set up operations. Erstwhile Hyderabad urban development authority (HUDA) was expanded in 2008 to form Hyderabad metropolitan area (HMA) covering 7100 km ² and population of 7.74 million (2011). The location extents of Hyderabad region is depicted in figure 1.

Fig. 1 Study area: Hyderabad

3.1. Data Used

Landsat data (30m x 30m) were downloaded from USGS Earth Explorer (http://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/). It was seen that cloud cover for all these satellite images were minimum and multiple year data were obtained for the same month to avoid seasonal variations. Imageries were also downloaded from Aster GDEM satellite. Spatial reference for all these data were WGS 1984, UTM zone 44. Data used are as listed in table 1.

Table 1 Materials and data used for the analysis.