Observation of the Agricultural Residue Burning Using Multi-Pollutant Satellite Retrievals

Agriculture residue burning has significant environmental impacts such as death of wildlife and beneficial organisms in the soil, reduction of soil productivity, and negative effects on economic development. It contributes to air pollution, climate change and has negative impacts on human health. Although it is not allowed in many countries, residues were burned in agricultural fields after harvesting to plough the fields easily and kill the insects and weeds. Global Forest Watch showed increasing fire counts during the summer period in Turkey, especially in the southern parts. Recent land cover datasets (CORINE 2018) are indicating that some of these fire areas are in agricultural fields, instead of forested areas. For example, 34% and 58% of the annual fires in Adana, and Osmaniye provinces were in August 2018, respectively. These signals are believed to be associated with agricultural residue burning. The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of agricultural residue burning on air quality in the southern Turkey during the 2018 summer period. The current emission inventory available for the region (EMEP 2018) does not include real-time uncontrolled agricultural residue burning emissions with spatial allocation. Since the ground-based monitoring stations mainly located in urban areas, are sensitive to meteorological factors and their numbers are limited, they are not sufficient to investigate the effects of residue burning by themselves. Thus, the initial study made with ground-based measurements did not show significant pollution on the fire days. A multi-pollutant satellite retrieval processing is proposed for this study. VIIRS S-NPP Fire Radiative Power product along with high-resolution TROPOMI NO2, HCHO, CO products are used for fire activity and pollutant monitoring, respectively. The spatial distribution of the pollutants is investigated in a 4x4 km2 gridded domain mainly covering the agricultural areas, and highly impacted regions are determined. The temporal changes in the pollutant levels are also investigated to associate with the daily fire locations and intensities. The results are to be used for preparing an emission inventory for residue burning, which can later be used for air quality modeling to quantify the impacts for the region.