ISPRS Archives XXXVIII-8/W3 Workshop Proceedings: Impact of Climate Change on Agriculture 276 AN ACCOUNT OF RESIDUE BURNING FROM AGRICULTURAL SYSTEM IN INDIA USING SPACE BASED OBSERVATIONS

One of the major sources of emission of green house gases (GHGs) is biomass burning. Thus the space-based observations of global distribution of fire form a key component of climate change studies. Several international programs have been established towards the goal of gaining complete information on fire activity around the world using space based observations. This study mainly highlights the spatiotemporal occurrence of agricultural residues burning in Indo-Gangetic plains of India using fire products from space borne satellites. The 3 years daily active fire data from MODIS (Aqua/Terra) have been used from August, 2006 to July, 2009. The data analysis showed that out of total fire events, around 69% contribution comes from agricultural areas and remaining (31%) comes from non-agricultural areas. This is mainly due to the intensive cultivation happening in this belt. It has also been found that, 84% of agriculture residues burning is from RiceWheat system (RWS) and remaining 16% in other types of crop rotations. The fire incidents are reported very high in October-December (55%) compared to that in March-May (36%), indicating that burning of rice residue is more prevalent than that of wheat. This paper highlights some of these facts to understand the agriculture residue burning scenario in relation to agriculture practice as a basic fact sheet and as a step towards mitigation planning. *[email protected]