Estimation of Wheat/Rice Residue Burning Areas in Major Districts of Haryana, India, Using Remote Sensing Data

Abstract

Haryana has emerged as an important state for Rice & Wheat production in India contributing significantly in the central pool. Mechanized combine harvesting technologies, which have become common in Rice Wheat System (RWS) in India, leave behind large quantities of straw in the field for open burning of residue. Besides causing pollution, the burning kills the useful micro flora of the soil causing soil degradation. There is no field survey (Girdawari) data available with the Government for the areas where stubble burning is taking place. The present paper describes the methodology and results of wheat and rice residue burning areas for three districts of Haryana namely Kaithal, Kurukshetra and Karnal for the year 2010 using complete enumeration approach of multi-date IRS-P6 AWiFS and LISS-III data. In season ground truth was collected using hand held GPS and used to identify area of burnt wheat/rice residues, associated crops and land features. After geo-referencing the satellite images, district images were masked-out and multi-date image data stacks were created. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) of each date was generated and used at the time of classification along with other spectral bands. The non-agricultural classes in the image included: forest, wasteland, water bodies, urban/settlement and permanent vegetation etc. The vector of these non-agriculture classes were extracted from the land use, imported and mask was generated. During the classification non-agriculture area was excluded by using mask of these classes. From this the agricultural area could be separated out. The area was estimated by computing pixels under the classified image mask. In season multi-date AWiFS data along with available single-date LISS-III data between third week of April to last week of May are found to be useful for estimation of wheat residue burning areas estimation. The data between second week of October to last week of November is useful for estimation of rice residue burning areas estimation at district level.