Coastal cities contrive to spread their transformative influence both into the hinterland, along the coastline, and into the coastal waters themselves. These effects will be intensified in urban agglomerations as the concentration of population and allied activities are more pronounced there compared to the inland regions. Indian coastal cities are no exception, and it is high time to delineate these hazard-prone regions and implement proper mitigation and adaptation strategies at city scale. This review article provides an assessment regarding quantification, management and climate change impacts of flood risks in Surat, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata, which are the most populated coastal cities in India. The flood impacts considered in the existing or prevailing analyses are associated with adverse effects on population, land use of cities, transportation and economy caused by different types of riverine and urban flooding, though coastal flooding, tsunami and storm surge effects are less studied. Mumbai and Kolkata are relatively progressive in the assessment of flood risks and adaptation. The present article also suggests strategies to evaluate the relative progress in the assessment of past and future risks and adaptation. We also discuss the mitigation and adaptation strategies considering the historical importance of these cities. We propose that the strategies should be implemented considering public opinion and should be initialized at the grass root level. Though it is technically difficult to re-plan the city structures in the current scenario, it is possible to adapt to and mitigate the effects of natural hazards through suitable planning and management with the integrated cooperation and involvement of citizens and government as well.

Multi-temporal and multi-sensor satellite data calibration is an inherent problem in remote sensing-based applications. If multiple satellite scenes cover the study area, it is difficult to compare and process the images for change detection and long-term trend analysis of the same day and/or seasons from different satellites or sensors. Moreover, the validation of all the past images is a challenge due to unavailability of past ground truth datasets. The proposed calibration paradigm in this study is based on radiance normalization in the spatial and spectral domain to ease the alignment of multiple images into an identical radiometric foundation. In this study, an intuitive radiometric correction technique (at a daily, monthly and yearly scale) was proposed, aimed at all Landsat sensors' datasets for long-term Land Use Land Cover (LULC) trend analysis for a dry semi-arid river basin in western India, facing drought conditions. The post-calibration mosaiced images were smooth, and meaningful LULC classification results could be obtained easily for all the years. The LULC change dynamics were analyzed and compared for the years 1972, 1980, 1991, 2001, 2011 and 2016 in Shivna River Basin. During these study periods, wasteland was found to be the most altered class, followed by agricultural land and forest. The spatial extent of agricultural land was found to decrease linearly, while forest cover showed an exponential decrease; a linear increase was observed in wasteland. Though during the 44 years study period (1972–2016), 241.48 km 2 area was converted to agricultural land from wasteland, but more than double that land was converted to wasteland from agricultural land; alarmingly, 5.18% (8.12% in 1972 and 2.94% in 2016) forest cover decreased. The existing forest cover in 2016 is approximately one-third compared to 1972. The present work provides a generic framework for the calibration of multi-temporal and multi-sensor satellite images for long-term LULC trend analysis, which can be adopted for other satellite datasets.

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Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) is the largest coastal city in India. The region experienced tremendous growth over the years due to rapid industrialization and urbanization. MMR is also the major center of economic activity in India. As a result there is a continuous and constant influx of population from the rest of the country. The high population density and uneven growth rate have resulted in serious environmental problems in the MMR coastal region. This paper discusses several aspects of the MMR coastal region that suffer from a wide variety of environmental as well as socio-economic problems due to unplanned and non-integrated sectoral developmental activities over the years. These problems need to be addressed in developing an Integrated Coastal Management plan for the MMR coastal region.

The main goal in stimulating shale formations is to maximize the reservoir contact with the hydraulic fracture face. In order to achieve this goal current practices include pumping low-viscosity fluids at high rates with small mesh proppant cycles. A novel approach was used in a well in the Eagle Ford shale to enhance the stimulated area. This technique, called "relax-a-frac", was developed by an operator/service company alliance during the exploration phase. Real-time microseismic hydraulic fracture monitoring (RT HFM) indicated that the conventional slickwater treatments were not providing adequate lateral coverage across the planned stage. To address this issue, controlled changes were made to the pumping schedule, and the effects were evaluated using RT HFM. The results indicated that relax-a-frac proved to be highly successful in increasing the estimated stimulated volume (ESV) in this formation and area.In relax-a-frac, a part of the stimulation treatment was pumped (usually pad plus proppant slugs), followed by an extended shutdown to relax the formation. Once the surface pressure reached a predetermined value, the treatment was resumed, as per program, with monitoring for microseismic activity. The microseismic activity observed during the second part of the treatment showed a significant increase compared to that of the first part, with improved lateral coverage. The resultant ESV increased significantly from this technique as compared to any other specific changes tried on these wells. Production log results from Well 1 showed a definitive correlation between production contribution and the ESV derived from HFM analysis. This paper documents that this novel approach more effectively stimulates the Eagle Ford shale when compared to the typical treatment designs. Conclusions from a detailed comparison of the well performance and its relation to the treatment design are included.