• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.30 no.6
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• pp.797-807
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• 2014

The Sea Surface Temperature (SST) is one of the most important oceanic environmental factors in determining the change of marine environments and ecological activities. Satellite thermal infrared images can be effective for understanding the global trend of sea surface temperature due to large scale. However, their low spatial resolution caused some limitations in some areas where complicated and refined coastal shapes due to many islands are present as in the Korean Peninsula. The coastal ocean is also very important because human activities interact with the environmental change of coastal area and most aqua farming is distributed in the coastal ocean. Thus, low-cost airborne thermal infrared remote sensing with high resolution capability is considered for verifying its possibility to extract SST and to monitor the changes of coastal environment. In this study, an airborne thermal infrared system was implemented using a low-cost and ground-based thermal infrared camera (FLIR), and more than 8 airborne acquisitions were carried out in the western coast of the Korean Peninsula during the periods between May 23, 2012 and December 7, 2013. The acquired thermal infrared images were radiometrically calibrated using an atmospheric radiative transfer model with a support from a temperature-humidity sensor, and geometrically calibrated using GPS and IMU sensors. In particular, the airborne sea surface temperature acquired in June 25, 2013 was compared and verified with satellite SST as well as ship-borne thermal infrared and in-situ SST data. As a result, the airborne thermal infrared sensor extracted SST with an accuracy of $1^{\circ}C$.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.450-463
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• 2006

Seasonal threshold values for fog detection over the ten airport areas within the Korean Peninsula have been derived from the data of polar-orbit Aqua/Terra MODIS and geostationary GOES-9 during a two years. The values are obtained from reflectance at $0.65{\mu}m\;(R_{0.65})$ and the difference in brightness temperature between $3.7{\mu}m\;and\;11{\mu}m\;(T_{3.7-11})$. In order to examine the discrepancy between the threshold values of two kinds of satellites, the following four parameters have been analyzed under the condition of daytime/nighttime and fog/clear-sky, utilizing their simultaneous observations over the Seoul metropolitan area: brightness temperature at $3.7{\mu}m$, the temperature at $11{\mu}m,\;the\;T_{3.7-11}$ for day and night, and the $R_{0.65}$ for daytime. The parameters show significant correlations (r<0.5) in spatial distribution between the two kinds of satellites. The discrepancy between their infrared thresholds is mainly due to the disagreement in their spatial resolutions and spectral bands, particularly at $3.7{\mu}m$. Fog detection from GOES-9 over the nine airport areas except the Cheongju airport has revealed accuracy of 60% in the daytime and 70% in the nighttime, based on statistical verification. The accuracy decreases in foggy cases with twilight, precipitation, short persistence, or the higher cloud above fog. The sensitivity of radiance and reflectance with wavelength has been analyzed in numerical experiments with respect to various meteorological conditions to investigate optical characteristics of the three channels.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.525-536
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• 2014

In this study, a method to assess and monitor hydrological drought using remote sensing was investigated for use in regions with limited observation data, and was applied to the Upper Namhangang basin in South Korea, which was seriously affected by the 2008-2009 drought. Drought information may be obtained more easily from meteorological data based on water balance than hydrological data that are hard to estimate. Air temperature data at 2 m above ground level (AGL) were estimated using remotely sensed data, evapotranspiration was estimated from the air temperature, and the correlations between precipitation minus evapotranspiration (P-PET) and streamflow percentiles were examined. Land Surface Temperature data with $1{\times}1km$ spatial resolution as well as Atmospheric Profile data with $5{\times}5km$ spatial resolution from MODIS sensor on board Aqua satellite were used to estimate monthly maximum and minimum air temperature in South Korea. Evapotranspiration was estimated from the maximum and minimum air temperature using the Hargreaves method and the estimates were compared to existing data of the University of Montana based on Penman-Monteith method showing smaller coefficient of determination values but smaller error values. Precipitation was obtained from TRMM monthly rainfall data, and the correlations of 1-, 3-, 6-, and 12-month P-PET percentiles with streamflow percentiles were analyzed for the Upper Namhan-gang basin in South Korea. The 1-month P-PET percentile during JJA (r = 0.89, tau = 0.71) and SON (r = 0.63, tau = 0.47) in the Upper Namhan-gang basin are highly correlated with the streamflow percentile with 95% confidence level. Since the effect of precipitation in the basin is especially high, the correlation between evapotranspiration percentile and streamflow percentile is positive. These results indicate that remote sensing-based P-PET estimates can be used for the assessment and monitoring of hydrological drought. The high spatial resolution estimates can be used in the decision-making process to minimize the adverse impacts of hydrological drought and to establish differentiated measures coping with drought.

• Journal of Korean Society for Geospatial Information Science
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.105-113
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• 2016

Fire radiative power(FRP), which means the power radiated from wildfire, is used to estimate fire emissions. Currently, the geostationary satellites of East Asia do not provide official FRP products yet, whereas the American and European geostationary satellites are providing near-real-time FRP products for Europe, Africa and America. This paper describes the first retrieval of Himawari-8 FRP using the mid-infrared radiance method and shows the comparisons with MODIS FRP for Sumatra, Indonesia. Land surface emissivity, an essential parameter for mid-infrared radiance method, was calculated using NDVI(normalized difference vegetation index) and FVC(fraction of vegetation coverage) according to land cover types. Also, the sensor coefficient for Himawari-8(a = 3.11) was derived through optimization experiments. The mean absolute percentage difference was about 20%, which can be interpreted as a favourable performance similar to the validation statistics of the American and European satellites. The retrieval accuracies of Himawari FRP were rarely influenced by land cover types or solar zenith angle, but parts of the pixels showed somewhat low accuracies according to the fire size and viewing zenith angle. This study will contribute to estimation of wildfire emissions and can be a reference for the FRP retrieval of current and forthcoming geostationary satellites in East Asia.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.331-337
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• 2016

Water vapor is main absorption factor of outgoing longwave radiation. So, it is essential to monitoring the changes in the amount of water vapor and to understanding the causes of such changes. In this study, we monitor temporal variability of Total Precipitable Water (TPW) which observed by satellite. Among climate variables, precipitation play an important part to analyze temporal variability of water vapor because it is produced by water vapor. And El $Ni{\tilde{n}}o$ is one of climate variables which appear regularly in comparison with the others. Through them, we analyze relationship between temporal variability of TPW and climate variable. In this study, we analyzed long-term change of TPW from Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroadiometer (MODIS) data and change of precipitation in middle area of Korea peninsula quantitatively. After these analysis, we compared relation of TPW and precipitation with El $Ni{\tilde{n}}o$. The aim of study is to research El $Ni{\tilde{n}}o$ has an impact on TPW and precipitation change in middle area of Korea peninsula. First of all, we calculated TPW and precipitation from time series analysis quantitatively, and anomaly analysis is performed to analyze their correlation. As a result, TPW and precipitation has correlation mostly but the part had inverse correlation was found. This was compared with El $Ni{\tilde{n}}o$ of anomaly results. As a result, TPW and precipitation had inverse correlation after El $Ni{\tilde{n}}o$ occurred. It was found that El $Ni{\tilde{n}}o$ have a decisive effect on change of TPW and precipitation.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.73-86
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• 2016

In this study, an algorithm to estimate Aerosol Optical Thickness (AOT) over small cities during nighttime has been developed by using the radiance from artificial light sources in small cities measured from Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) sensor's Day/Night Band (DNB) aboard the Suomi-National Polar Partnership (Suomi-NPP) satellite. The algorithm is based on Beer's extinction law with the light sources from the artificial lights over small cities. AOT is retrieved for cloud-free pixels over individual cities, and cloud-screening was conducted by using the measurements from M-bands of VIIRS at infrared wavelengths. The retrieved nighttime AOT is compared with the aerosol products from MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard Terra and Aqua satellites. As a result, the correlation coefficients over individual cities range from around 0.6 and 0.7 between the retrieved nighttime AOT and MODIS AOT with Root-Mean-Squared Difference (RMSD) ranged from 0.14 to 0.18. In addition, sensitivity tests were conducted for the factors affecting the nighttime AOT to estimate the range of uncertainty in the nighttime AOT retrievals. The results of this study indicate that it is promising to infer AOT using the DNB measaurements over small cities in Korea at night. After further development and refinement in the future, the developed retrieval algorithm is expected to produce nighttime aerosol information which is not operationally available over Korea.

• Journal of Wetlands Research
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.171-179
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• 2011

The main objective of this study is to estimate of the vegetation response induced by climate change to soil moisture. We investigated a relationship between vegetation activity and climate variables using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)-retrieved Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and soil moisture. NDVI which extracted from MODIS 13 Vegetation Indices Product was considered as an useful parameter to figure out a relationship with two types of soil moisture, which were observed at Rural Development Administration sites and estimated from Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer E (AMSR-E) satellite imagery. The correlation of MODIS-NDVI and ground measured soil moisture were observed, became much stronger when compared to soil moisture values with time lag (5days, 10days, 15days). The correlation patterns between NDVI and soil moisture with different time lag were related to soil texture. The results from this study will be useful to understand the role of vegetation in water balance control in various scales from regional to global climate change.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.31 no.6
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• pp.600-607
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• 2010

In 2008, multiple episodes of large-scale transport of natural airborne particles and anthropogenically affected particles from different sources in the East Asian continent were identified in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellite RGB-composite images and the mass concentrations of ground level particulate matters. To analyze the aerosol size distribution during the large-scale transport of atmospheric aerosols, both aerosol optical depth (AOD; proportional to the aerosol total loading in the vertical column) and fine aerosol weighting (FW; fractional contribution of fine aerosol to the total AOD) of Moderate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aerosol products were used over the East Asian region. The six episodes of massive natural airborne particles were observed at Cheongwon, originating from sandstorms in northern China, Mongolia and the loess plateau of China. The $PM_{10}$ and $PM_{2.5}$ stood at 70% and 16% of the total mass concentration of TSP, respectively. However, the mass concentration of $PM_{2.5}$ among TSP increased as high as 23% in the episode in which they were flowing in by way f the industrial area in east China. In the other five episodes of anthropogenically affected particles that flowed into the Korean Peninsula from east China, the mass concentrations of $PM_{10}$ and $PM_{2.5}$ among TSP reached 82% and 65%, respectively. The average AOD for the large-scale transport of anthropogenically affected particle episodes in the East Asian region was measured at $0.42{\pm}0.17$ compared with AOD ($0.36{\pm}0.13$) for the natural airborne particle episodes. Particularly, the regions covering east China, the Yellow Sea, the Korean Peninsula, and the east Korean sea were characterized by high levels of AOD. The average FW values observed during the event of anthropogenically affected aerosols ($0.63{\pm}0.16$) were moderately higher than those of natural airborne particles ($0.52{\pm}0.13$). This observation suggests that anthropogenically affected particles contribute greatly to the atmospheric aerosols in East Asia.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.69-78
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• 2011

Rice is one of the world's staple foods. Paddy rice fields have unique biophysical characteristics that the rice is grown on flooded soils unlike other crops. Information on the spatial distribution of paddy fields and the timing of irrigation are of importance to determine hydrological balance and efficiency of water resource management. In this paper, we detected the timing of irrigation and spatial distribution of paddy fields using the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor onboard the NASA EOS Aqua satellite. The timing of irrigation was detected by the combined use of MODIS-based vegetation index and Land Surface Water Index (LSWI). The detected timing of irrigation showed good agreement with field observations from two flux sites in Korea and Japan. Based on the irrigation detection, a land cover map of paddy fields was generated with subsidiary information on seasonal patterns of MODIS enhanced vegetation index (EVI). When the MODISbased paddy field map was compared with a land cover map from the Ministry of Environment, Korea, it overestimated the regions with large paddies but underestimated those with small and fragmented paddies. Potential reasons for such spatial discrepancies may be attributed to coarse pixel resolution (500 m) of MODIS images, uncertainty in parameterization of threshold values for discarding forest and water pixels, and the application of LSWI threshold value developed for paddy fields in China. Nevertheless, this study showed that an improved utilization of seasonal patterns of MODIS vegetation and water-related indices could be applied in water resource management and enhanced estimation of evapotranspiration from paddy fields.