Abstract
Site-specific minimum temperature forecasts are critical in a short-term decision making procedure for preventive measures as well as a long-term strategy such as site selection in fruits industry. Nocturnal cold air pools frequently termed in mountainous areas under anticyclonic systems are very dangerous to the flowering buds in spring over Korea, but the spatial resolution to detect them exceeds the current weather forecast scale. To supplement the insufficient spatial resolution of official forecasts, we developed a GIS - assisted frost risk assesment scheme for using in mountainous areas. Daily minimum temperature data were obtained from 6 sites located in a 2.1 by 2.1 km area with complex topography near the southern edge of Sobaek mountains during radiative cooling nights in spring 2001. A digital elevation model with a 10 m spatial resolution was prepared for the entire study area and the cold air inflow was simulated for each grid cell by counting the number of surrounding cells coming into the processing cell. Primitive temperature surfaces were prepared for the corresponding dates by interpolating the Korea Meteorological Administration's automated observational data with the lapse rate correction. The cell temperature values corresponding to the 6 observation sites were extracted from the primitive temperature surface, and subtracted from the observed values to obtain the estimation error. The errors were regressed to the flow accumulation at the corresponding cells, delineating a statistically significant relationship. When we applied this relationship to the primitive temperature surfaces of frost nights during April 2002, there was a good agreement with the observations, showing a feasibility of site-specific frost warning system development in mountainous areas.