GIS and RS: Technology for determination of fire extent under Jharia Coalfields

GIS has emerged as one of the most important tools of social and infrastructure development sectors. It has been widely used in developed countries in India, it has been widely used by forest and land management departments, land records, transportation and communication, municipal corporations etc. The coalfield has more than 70 mine fires spread over an area of about 17 sq km. The coalfield is also known for hosting the maximum number of known coal fires among all coalfields in India. A sizable area, about 35 sq km, has subsided in the coalfield. On a rough estimate about 7,000 million tons of coal reserves are blocked under various surface properties, etc. and about 1,800 million tones are blocked below fire. The coalfield has a vast network of railway lines for the transport of coal which connects Eastern Railway to South Eastern Railway Jharia Coal field has been in news for Coal fires since independence. Remote Sensing is a new and cheep technique of the 21st century. Though there are substantial materials available on website regarding detection of surface fire and sub surface fire using LANDSAT TM data. The present paper is an attempt to identify the surface fire through mono Window Algorithm. The LANDSAT data was put to atmospheric and radiometric correction by converting the raw DN value into spectral radiance. Emissivity image is also created in attempt to calculate the temperature map based on the emissivity image drawn from an NDVI image. Though this does not help mush and therefore temperature map of 1988, 1990, 1994 and 1996 have been made using single emissivity of 0.97. Temperature obtained is in degree Kelvin. DEM of the area is also been created. Road and railway network is also mapped using IRS LISS 4 data. Unsupervised Classification is done using ISODATA Clustering