• Korean Journal of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.140-147
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• 2004

Agrometeorological information is essential in many agricultural decisions if it reaches the user in a timely and appropriate manner. Agriculture is the backbone to local, regional, and global economic development. Thus, strengthening agrometeorological application to diverse agricultural sectors will benefit economic development. This paper discusses three distinct organizational minions that all share the same need for improved information technology. The World Meteorological Organization's (WMOs) Commission for Agricultural Meteorology (CAgM) has global responsibility for improved agrometeorological services of Members to aid agricultural production and to conserve natural resources. The United States Department of Agriculture, World Agricultural Outlook Board, publishes monthly World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates, considered to be a benchmark for both government and industry in production and trade decisions. The National Drought Policy Commission (NDPC), created by an act of the United States Congress, formulated a national drought policy based on preparedness rather than on crisis management. All three organizations recognize the need for IT applications in agricultural meteorology and have been active in implementing this technology. The development of information technology offers new means of dissemination of agrometeorological products. World Agrometeorological Information Service (WAMIS) has taken advantage of the global Internet application to offer WMO Members a dedicated web server to host agrometeorological bulletins and training modules.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.403-417
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• 2014

Increased frequency of climate extremes is another face of climate change confronted by humans, resulting in catastrophic losses in agriculture. While climate extremes take place on many scales, impacts are experienced locally and mitigation tools are a function of local conditions. To address this, agrometeorological early warning systems must be place and location based, incorporating the climate, crop and land attributes at the appropriate scale. Existing services often lack site-specific information on adverse weather and countermeasures relevant to farming activities. Warnings on chronic long term effects of adverse weather or combined effects of two or more weather elements are seldom provided, either. This lecture discusses a field-specific early warning system implemented on a catchment scale agrometeorological service, by which volunteer farmers are provided with face-to-face disaster warnings along with relevant countermeasures. The products are based on core techniques such as scaling down of weather information to a field level and the crop specific risk assessment. Likelihood of a disaster is evaluated by the relative position of current risk on the standardized normal distribution from climatological normal year prepared for 840 catchments in South Korea. A validation study has begun with a 4-year plan for implementing an operational service in Seomjin River Basin, which accommodates over 60,000 farms and orchards. Diverse experiences obtained through this study will certainly be useful in planning and developing the nation-wide disaster early warning system for agricultural sector.

• Proceedings of The Korean Society of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology Conference
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• 2014.10a
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• pp.25-48
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• 2014

Increased frequency of climate extremes is another face of climate change confronted by humans, resulting in catastrophic losses in agriculture. While climate extremes take place on many scales, impacts are experienced locally and mitigation tools are a function of local conditions. To address this, agrometeorological early warning systems must be place and location based, incorporating the climate, crop and land attributes at the appropriate scale. Existing services often lack site-specific information on adverse weather and countermeasures relevant to farming activities. Warnings on chronic long term effects of adverse weather or combined effects of two or more weather elements are seldom provided, either. This lecture discusses a field-specific early warning system implemented on a catchment scale agrometeorological service, by which volunteer farmers are provided with face-to-face disaster warnings along with relevant countermeasures. The products are based on core techniques such as scaling down of weather information to a field level and the crop specific risk assessment. Likelihood of a disaster is evaluated by the relative position of current risk on the standardized normal distribution from climatological normal year prepared for 840 catchments in South Korea. A validation study has begun with a 4-year plan for implementing an operational service in Seomjin River Basin, which accommodates over 60,000 farms and orchards. Diverse experiences obtained through this study will certainly be useful in planning and developing the nation-wide disaster early warning system for agricultural sector.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.320-331
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• 2013

The National Center for AgroMeteorology (NCAM) has designed a risk management solution for individual farms threatened by the climate change and variability. The new service produces weather risk indices tailored to the crop species and phenology by using site-specific weather forecasts and analysis derived from digital products of the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA). If the risk is high enough to cause any damage to the crops, agrometeorological warnings or watches are delivered to the growers' cellular phones with relevant countermeasures to help protect their crops against the potential damage. Core techniques such as scaling down of weather data to individual farm level and the crop specific risk assessment for operational service were developed and integrated into a cloud based service system. The system was employed and implemented in a rural catchment of 50 $km^2$ with diverse agricultural activities and 230 volunteer farmers are participating in this project to get the user-specific weather information from and to feed their evaluations back to NCAM. The experience obtained through this project will be useful in planning and developing the nation-wide early warning service in agricultural sector exposed to the climate and weather extremes under climate change and climate variability.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.118-126
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• 2004

Grid is a new Information Technology (IT) concept of "super Internet" for high-performance computing: worldwide collections of high-end resources such as supercomputers, storage, advanced instruments and immerse environments. The Grid is expected to bring together geographically and organizationally dispersed computational resources, such as CPUs, storage systems, communication systems, real-time data sources and instruments, and human collaborators. The term "the Grid" was coined in the mid1990s to denote a proposed distributed computing infrastructure for advanced science and engineering. The term computational Grids refers to infrastructures aimed at allowing users to access and/or aggregate potentially large numbers of powerful and sophisticated resources. More formally, Grids are defined as infrastructure allowing flexible, secure, and coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of individuals, institutions and resources referred to as virtual Organizations. GRID is an emerging IT as a kind of next generation Internet technology which will fit very well with agrometeorological services in the future. I believe that it would contribute to the resource sharing in agrometeorology by providing super computing power, virtual storage, and efficient data exchanges, especially for developing countries that are suffering from the lack of resources for their agmet services at national level. Thus, the establishment of CAgM-GRID based on existing RADMINSII is proposed as a part of FWIS of WMO.part of FWIS of WMO.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.317-325
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• 2015

An adequate downscaling of synoptic forecasts is a prerequisite for improved agrometeorological service to rural areas in South Korea where complex terrains and small farms are common. In this study, geospatial schemes based on topoclimatology were used to scale down the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) temperature forecasts to the local scale (~30 m) across a rural catchment. Then, using these schemes, local temperatures were estimated at 14 validation sites at 0600 and 1500 LST in 2013/2014 and were compared with the observations. The estimation errors were substantially reduced for both 0600 and 1500 LST temperatures when compared against the uncorrected KMA products. The improvement was most notable at low lying locations for the 0600 temperature and at the locations on west- and south-facing slopes for the 1500 LST temperature. Using the downscaled real-time temperature data, a pilot service has started to provide the field-specific weather information tailored to meet the requirements of small-scale farms. For example, the service system makes a daily outlook on the phenology of crop species grown in a given field using the field-specific temperature data. When the temperature forecast is given for next morning, a frost risk index is calculated according to a known relationship of phenology and frost injury. If the calculated index is higher than a pre-defined threshold, a warning is issued and delivered to the grower's cellular phone with relevant countermeasures to help protect crops against frost damage.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.1-16
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• 2007

The use of information on natural resources is indispensable to most agricultural activities to avoid disasters, to improve input efficiency, and to increase lam income. Most information is prepared and managed at a spatial scale called the "Hydrologic Unit" (HU), which means watershed or small river basin, because virtually every environmental problem can be handled best within a single HU. South Korea consists of 840 such watersheds and, while other watershed-specific information is routinely managed by government organizations, there are none responsible for agricultural weather and climate. A joint research team of Kyung Hee University and the Agriculture, forestry and Fisheries Information Service has begun a 4-year project funded by the Ministry of Agriculture and forestry to establish a watershed-specific agricultural weather information service based on "high definition" digital climate maps (HD-DCMs) utilizing the state of the art geospatial climatological technology. For example, a daily minimum temperature model simulating the thermodynamic nature of cold air with the aid of raster GIS and microwave temperature profiling will quantify effects of cold air drainage on local temperature. By using these techniques and 30-year (1971-2000) synoptic observations, gridded climate data including temperature, solar irradiance, and precipitation will be prepared for each watershed at a 30m spacing. Together with the climatological normals, there will be 3-hourly near-real time meterological mapping using the Korea Meteorological Administration's digital forecasting products which are prepared at a 5 km by 5 km resolution. Resulting HD-DCM database and operational technology will be transferred to local governments, and they will be responsible for routine operations and applications in their region. This paper describes the project in detail and demonstrates some of the interim results.