Abstract
Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are often used to assess and monitor the environmental impacts caused by mining activities. The aim of this work was to develop a new application to produce dynamic maps for monitoring the temperature variations in a self-burning coal waste pile, under a GIS open source environment—GIS-ECOAL (freely available). The performance of the application was evaluated with distributed temperature measurements gathered in the S. Pedro da Cova (Portugal) coal waste pile. In order to obtain the temperature data, an optical fiber cable was disposed over the affected area of the pile, with 42 location stakes acting as precisely-located control points for the temperature measurement. A monthly data set from July (15 min of interval) was fed into the application and a video composed by several layouts with temperature measurements was created allowing for recognizing two main areas with higher temperatures. The field observations also allow the identification of these zones; however, the identification of an area with higher temperatures in the top of the studied area was only possible through the visualization of the images created by this application. The generated videos make possible the dynamic and continuous visualization of the combustion process in the monitored area.
Highlights
Despite the benefits to the economic and social sectors of many countries, both coal mining and coal consumption are responsible for impacts that are harmful to the environment and human health [1,2]
The surface and subsurface coal fire areas can be detected with different techniques, such as borehole temperature measurement, geophysical methods, thermo-compositional analysis, thermographic measurements, airborne remote sensing and space borne remote sensing techniques [10]
Chen et al [12] proposed an approach of a basis for a large-scale and low-cost topographic survey for sustainable environmental planning and for mitigating the environmental anthropogenic impacts due to mining, using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and digital terrain analysis based on elevation data
Summary
Despite the benefits to the economic and social sectors of many countries, both coal mining and coal consumption are responsible for impacts that are harmful to the environment and human health [1,2]. Considering that the management of the coal waste piles with continuous control and identification of probable evolution scenarios through temperature measurement is crucial to minimize the impacts of the process, an application based on an open source GIS software, allowing for evaluation and monitoring temperature in self-burning coal waste piles that would be very valuable in this field of geosciences. Such application would offer the possibility to modify the code and adapt it to any region with different characteristics, providing an added value for coal related fire control and monitoring. Was selected due to the lack of continuous data in other months
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