Spatiotemporal hazard assessment of municipal solid waste dumps through improved satellite-based indicators

Abstract

To investigate the seasonal and temporal variations of environmental impacts surrounding the municipal solid waste (MSW) dumping site in Bahawalpur, the study accomplished spatiotemporal analysis for three satellite-based indicators: bio indicators (B-Is), thermal indicators (T-I), and moisture indicators (M-I) over 7 years of data acquired using a space-based platform from 2015 to 2021. The average annual expansions of bio-, thermal-, and moisture-influenced zones are 1114, 1158, and 1129 m with severity range averages to 0.07, 2.96, and 0.07 respectively. The seasonal averages of bio-influenced zone are 1341, 1277, 1151, 1103, 1044, and 779 m; thermal-influenced zones are 1163, 1391,1433, 790, 1376, and 797 m; moisture-influenced zone are 1361, 1312, 1125, 1028 1148, and 803 m as found in wet summer, monsoon, winter I, winter II, spring, and dry summer respectively. The analysis discovers that bio- and moisture-influenced zones are dependent on meteorological conditions; however, seasonal temperature variations affect the thermal influence zone. In addition, both the Mann–Kendall test and innovative trend analysis have been used to find trends. The importance of SRS data as an alternative for costly and time-consuming in situ datasets has been verified by the present investigation. Consequently, in order to address the problem of environmental degradation, the proposed research will be beneficial in a variety of waste management domains, such as the location of engineered waste disposal facilities and contamination monitoring of different locations adjacent to the dumping sites.