Pantnagar Journal of Research

Abstract

The Punjab state, is among the major bread providers over the Indo-Gangetic Plain (IGP) region with its dominant cropping system being Rice-wheat. Due to large scale adoption of combine harvesters by most of the farmers in the state, huge amount of crop residue is left behind which is subjected to open field burning; so as to catch the next season crop. The resulting smoke act as a serious human health hazard and also pose a major threat to environment over the adjoining cities like Delhi-NCR. In this study, the major focus is on extent analysis and mapping the rice residue burning in Barnala and Sangrur districts of Punjab state for the year 2017 using Sentinel-2 satellite data. A multi-temporal, pre and post burn, vegetation and burn indices-based threshold algorithm was used for estimating the rice crop and residue burnt area in ENVI 4.8 software. Sentinel Application Platform (SNAP) toolbox and Sen2Cor processor was used for format and atmospheric correction, respectively. The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) and difference NBR (dNBR) approach on pre-defined threshold were used to categorize the pixels as crop, non-crop, burnt and unburnt. The results indicated that out of the total geographical area of 505’000 ha, 382.94’000 ha has been estimated under the rice crop in the year 2017-18. Further, 8.65 % and 59.38 % area was mapped as burnt on 20th October 2017 and 30th October 2017, respectively. It was also observed that a total of 68.08 % of total rice crop area got burnt till 30th October 2017. The study concluded that maximum residue burning events took place towards the end of October and starting of November in the study region.