Abstract
Abstract. Emission of smoke and aerosol from open field burning of crop residue is a long-standing subject matter of atmospheric pollution. In this study, we proposed a new approach of estimating fuel load in the fire pixels and corresponding emissions of selected GHGs and aerosols i.e. CO2, CO, NO2, SO2, and total particulate matter (TPM) due to burning of crop residue under rice and wheat cropping systems in Punjab in north-west India from 2002 to 2012. In contrasts to the conventional method that uses RPR ratio to estimate the biomass, fuel load in the fire pixels was estimated as a function of enhanced vegetation index (EVI). MODIS fire products were used to detect the fire pixels during harvesting seasons of rice and wheat. Based on the field measurements, fuel load in the fire pixels were modelled as a function of average EVI using second order polynomial regression. Average EVI for rice and wheat crops that were extracted through Fourier transformation were computed from MODIS time series 16 day EVI composites. About 23 % of net shown area (NSA) during rice and 11 % during wheat harvesting seasons are affected by field burning. The computed average fuel loads are 11.32 t/ha (±17.4) during rice and 10.89 t/ha (±8.7) during wheat harvesting seasons. Calculated average total emissions of CO2, CO, NO2, SO2 and TPM were 8108.41, 657.85, 8.10, 4.10, and 133.21 Gg during rice straw burning and 6896.85, 625.09, 1.42, 1.77, and 57.55 Gg during wheat burning. Comparison of estimated values shows better agreement with the previous concurrent estimations. The method, however, shows its efficiency parallel to the conventional method of estimation of fuel load and related pollutant emissions.
Highlights
Emission from vegetation fire is one of the major sources of atmospheric pollution (Yang et al, 2008)
Previous estimates of total crop residue burnt over India shown that about 116 Mt of crop waste was burnt in open field burning process (Venkataraman et al, 2006)
The comparison of the estimated area with the reported area by Directorate of Economics and Statistics (DES) shows that about 4.4% area is overestimated under rice cultivation, whereas, around 9% area is overestimated under wheat cultivation in Punjab
Summary
Emission from vegetation fire is one of the major sources of atmospheric pollution (Yang et al, 2008). The global emission of pyrogenic species from wide variety of biomass fuel was presented by Andreae and Merlet (2001). It shows that among all the biomass fuel types, forest fire is the major source of CO2 emission, agricultural residue burning comes in the second and contributes nearly contribute 25% of the total biomass burned (Chang and Song, 2009). Use of combined harvester produces an enormous amount of crop waste majority of which is cleared through the on-farm burning process. Previous estimates of total crop residue burnt over India shown that about 116 Mt of crop waste was burnt in open field burning process (Venkataraman et al, 2006). 17-35% of crop waste comes from cereal crops where rice-wheat system contributes more than 60% of it
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