Impact of green roofs on heavy rainfall in tropical, coastal urban area

Abstract

Green Roofs (GRs) are one of the measures considered for Urban Heat Island (UHI) mitigation. The cooling effects of GRs are well studied in the literature. However, previous work has not addressed the impacts of GRs on heavy rainfall in cities. This study develops and tests the hypothesis that incorporating green roofs in urban areas enhances the magnitude of rain for heavy rainfall events. To test this, examples of heavy rainfall events over three different years are examined over Mumbai, India, one of the megapoleis that continues to witness heavy rains and urban flooding. The heavy rain events are simulated using Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model for different green roof fraction (GF) scenarios (10%, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%) over the urban area. The GF simulations are compared to the ‘no GF’ simulation (control run). The results indicate a consistent increase (1%–72%) in the total accumulated precipitation in all GF scenarios. Additional moisture and increased equivalent potential temperature aided the formation and sustenance of localized pockets of enhanced rain occurrences, contributing to the total amount of rainfall for the rain events for the domain. The increase in rainfall amounts leads to higher runoff and can increase the risk of flash floods. Thus, it is necessary to account for this rainfall-based feedback of GR before adopting it as a mitigation option. The results of this work may be helpful in effective urban planning and managing the urban climate extremes.