Remote Sensing Applications for Crop Residue Burning Assessments

Abstract

Crop residue burning has become a major problem, for the environment as well as for human health. It hampers economic growth and development activities all over the world. Burning of crop residue produces large amount of atmospheric pollutants and greenhouse gases, that have a large impact on human health, air quality and climate at the global as well as the regional scale. Modern technologies, like harvesters, are becoming widely available for harvesting rice crops in India, but the burning of crop residues is a quick process, which incurs almost no cost, so it is preferred by farmers for clearing their land for the next crop within a short space of time. Today, remote-sensing technology has progressed a lot and various types of satellite data are freely available at various resolutions. Therefore, various Earth resources can be mapped and monitored, using remote-sensing technology. This review paper briefly covers the remote-sensing technology that is being used for the monitoring of crop residue burning, biomass estimation and the estimation of gases emitted due to residue burning.