Effectiveness of Sentinel-2 Data in Quantifying Agriculture Residue Burning in Madhya Pradesh

~ By Satvik Parashar

​India is a hotspot for residue burning, which is driven by the limited time the farmers have to plant the next crop and a lack of feasible alternatives to handle the crop residue. Not only is this responsible for increased carbon emissions, but the crop residue once burnt also produces radiatively active gases and particulate matter, causing additional contributions to climate change and a public health hazard forhumans.

It is essential to map the agriculture burned areas (ABAs) to analyze and mitigate emissions in the agricultural systems. While global fire emission inventories provide valuable information on the time and location of fires, they underestimate the small and fragmented fires. The smallholder systems have smaller field sizes (< 1.5 ha) and a short duration of fire (~30 minutes). The use of sentinel-2 data, which provide improved spatial (10 m) and temporal resolution could help capture these small and short-lived fires, and the study we summarize here attempts to test its efficacy in doing so. The study was conducted in the state of Madhya Pradesh, which has the majority of its land cover under crop area (Fig. 1) and is one of the most significant wheat-producing regions in Central India.

Fig. 1. (from paper) (a) Location of the study area in India. (b) Zoom in of the study area, the entire state of Madhya Pradesh

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