• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.9-20
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• 1999

The use of climatic information is essential in the industial society. More specialized weather servies are required to perform better industrial acivities including agriculture. Especially, crop models require daily weather data of crop growing area or cropping zones, where routine weather observations are rare. Estimates of the spatial distribution of daily climates might complement the low density of standard weather observation stations. This study was conducted to estimate the spatial distribution of daily minimum and maximum temperatures in Korean Peninsula. A topoclimatological technique was first applied to produce reasonable estimates of monthly climatic normals based on 1km $\times$ 1km grid cell over study area. Harmonic analysis method was then adopted to convert the monthly climatic normals into daily climatic normals. The daily temperatures for each grid cell were derived from a spatial interpolation procedure based on inverse-distance weighting of the observed deviation from the climatic normals at the nearest 4 standard weather stations. Data collected from more than 300 automatic weather systems were then used to validate the final estimates on several dates in 1997. Final step to confirm accuracy of the estimated temperature fields was comparing the distribution pattern with the brightness temperature fields derived from NOAA/AVHRR. Results show that differences between the estimated and the observed temperatures at 20 randomly selected automatic weather systems(AWS) range from -3.$0^{\circ}C$ to + 2.5$^{\circ}C$ in daily maximum, and from -1.8$^{\circ}C$ to + 2.2$^{\circ}C$ in daily minimum temperature. The estimation errors, RMSE, calculated from the data collected at about 300 AWS range from $1.5^{\circ}C$ to 2.5$^{\circ}C$ for daily maximum/minimum temperatures.