The unusual stubble burning season of 2020 in northern India: a satellite perspective

ABSTRACT

We analysed nine years (2012–2019) of fire observations from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) onboard the Suomi-NPP satellite to assess the post-monsoon crop stubble burning activities over northern India. The 2020 fire season (September-November) was analysed extensively, and spatiotemporal trends were examined. Our analysis indicates that about 60% of post-monsoon fires occurred in the state of Punjab, followed by Madhya Pradesh (11%), Haryana (4%), and Uttar Pradesh (3%). The year 2020 saw the greatest fire activity in Punjab and across the country since 2016. Over the nine years, Punjab did not show any systematic trends in fire activities, whereas Haryana and Madhya Pradesh demonstrated an overall decreasing (45% lower in 2020 compared to the 2012–2019 mean) and increasing (185% more in 2020 compared to 2012–2019 mean) trends, respectively. The high fire occurance in the Punjab are related to high percentage of crop area with specific variety of rice, which produces high straw load and mature in shorter time. The increase in Madhya Pradesh is directly related to an increase in rice crop planting area over the years, whereas the decrease in Haryana is related to changes in crop residue management. The uncertainty analysis in this paper shows that over a given region, day-to-day variability in fire counts can have sampling biases due to changing satellite viewing geometry. Furthermore, long-term trends can also be impacted by the reduced sampling of satellite fire detections under cloudy conditions. However, large scale spatiotemporal analysis of fires in this area provides crucial and well sought-after information for crop fire control and air quality management in north India. The district level analysis for the four states signifies the critical information that satellites can provide for identifying hotspots and planning regionally focused mitigation strategies to curb pollution from crop burning fires.

KEYWORDS:

• Fires
• Air Quality
• Satellite
• VIIRS
• Indo-Gangetic Plain
• India
• Pollution

Acknowledgements

Pawan Gupta, and Falguni Patadia were supported by the NASA ROSES program NNH17ZDA001N-TAS-NPP: The Science of Terra, Aqua, and Suomi NPP. The fire data were downloaded from NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS). We thank University of Alabama student Jashwanth Reddy Tupili for data downloading and initial processing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

Conceptualization, PG, FP; software, PG.; formal analysis, PG; writing – original draft preparation, PG.; writing – review and editing, FP, SAC, NR; visualization, PG; supervision, PG; project administration, PG.; funding acquisition, PG, FP. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Data availability statement

The fire detection datasets used in the analysis are obtained from NASA’s Fire Information for Resources Management System (FIRMS -https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/). The datasets are available to download from the above link public. The processed datasets for India used in this analysis are also available from https://www.nsstc.uah.edu/data/sundar/MODIS_AOD_L3_HRG/

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/01431161.2023.2277160

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the NASA ROSES program NNH17ZDA001N-TAS-NPP: The Science of Terra, Aqua, and Suomi NPP.