Application of remote sensing to identify coalfires in the Raniganj Coalbelt, India

Raniganj and Jharia regions together have been for long the single largest coal supplier in India, now contributing about a quarter of the total output in the country. Numerous reasons such as improper mining techniques and policy, as well as unauthorized mining caused surface and subsurface coalfires in these areas. These coalfires burn millions of tonnes of valuable coal resources, creating severe environmental problems and posing enormous operational difficulties of mining. After first use of remote sensing as a tool to identify coalfires in 1960s, with the time, the efficiency of remote sensing to identify and monitoring coalfires has been well established by several researchers. With the knowledge of local geological setting and density sliced surface temperature image the spatial distribution of coalfires can be revealed. The present paper makes an attempt to identify temperature anomalies of the Raniganj coalbelt to locate the spatial distribution of coalfires. Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) thermal band data was used to calculate surface temperature along with NDVI (normalized vegetation index) derived emissivity.