Spatial-temporal analysis of coal fire risk identification and suppression assessment with satellite time series mapping 2013-2020 in Midong coalfield, Xinjiang, China

Abstract

ABSTRACT         Spontaneous combustion of underground coal seam leads to significant loss of coal resource while causing serious geological disasters, environmental degradation and social security problems. The Midong Coalfield in Urumqi was selected to conduct research on dynamic detection and assessment of underground coal fires from 2013 to 2020 based on time series satellite imagery of Landsat-8. The land surface temperature (LST) was retrieved using RTE. The hotspot SFSE was proposed to map the spatial-temporal distribution of coal fires. The CTIR was also established to solve how to comprehensively evaluate the intensity and spatial variations of coal fire thermal island effect. Based on Sequence Overlap Analysis the integrated dynamic interpretation of thermal anomaly intensity, area and migration of coal fire hazard has been provided. In addition, the TADC was proposed to effectively reflect the active fire centre and aggregation tendency. The results show that: The RTE inversion error is within 4.6 °C, verified with the surveyed LST. The overall accuracy of fire thermal anomaly extraction by HSA by field-tested exceeds 65%. A feature can be judged to be a fire pixel when its recurrence reaches 75% or more of the total number of observation frequency. The maximum and minimum extent extracted of the total fire area is 65.6×105 and 46.6×105 m2, respectively. And the overall expansion rate is 1.29×105 m2 year−1, in 82% agreement with the measurement. The burning intensity of CTIR first increases 0.024 year−1 averagely, but then decreases at a rate of 0.0055 year−1. Fractures and faults in the fire-affected area play a critical role in fire induction and distribution. Frequent mining and excavation activities are confirmed to accelerate the further fire production and propagation. After suppression, the relevant fire area has shrunken by up to 60%, while the overall CTIR is reduced by more than 70%.