Land Use/Land Cover Status relating the Coal fire of Jharia Coal Field - An Analytical Case Study by RS-GIS Techniques

Jharia coal mines are India's most important storehouse of prime coke coal used in blast furnaces, it consists of 23 large underground and nine large open cast mines. The mining activities in these coalfields started in 1894 and had really intensified in 1925. Jharia is famous for a coal field fire that has burned underground for nearly a century. The first fire was detected in 1916. The rapid and extensive underground and opencast mining is going on continuously in an area like the Jharia Coal Field (JCF), where temperature and land-use studies are of paramount importance. Remote sensing and GIS techniques have been used to identify the action of different NDVI, temperature, land-use classes on satellite imagery and enhanced products and identify the action of time-sequential changes in temperature and land-use patterns that have occurred in the JCF since 2001 June and particularly between to June 2011 have been investigated. The different temperature and land-use classes, recognized from satellite image data and field surveys, are Settlement, Barren Land, agricultural land, Scrub land, vegetation, river sand, mining area, and fellow land. A number of image processing operations have been carried out on remote sensing data for enhancing NDVI patterns. It has been found that Landsat TM, ETM+ false color composites (FCC) of bands 4, 3 and 2, FCC of bands 7, 5 and 3, FCC of bands 5, 4 and 3 and ratio images provide very useful information for land-use mapping. The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) images have been used for vegetation studies and deference land surface temperature. So, magnitude of the mining area is rapidly increasing day to day on temporal scale and total increase in mining from 2001 to 2011 is 4.85%. Temperature and Land-use changes have been detected by image differencing, rationing and of NDVI images. In the year 2001, the eastern part of the Jharia coal field was more affected by coal fire than the western part. Hence, the eastern part is always affected by the coal fire. An increase (1.67 km2) in the total coal-fire area was observed from 2001 to 2011. There are some human settlements present close to mining and fire-affected areas. That is extensive mining area, establishment of communication networks, expansion of settlements and decrease in the vegetation cover area etc. , have remodeled the face of the JCF of is inferred from the remote sensing images.