• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.45 no.7
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• pp.729-741
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• 2012

Among the methods of precipitation data acquisition, a rain gauge station has a distinctive advantage of direct measurement of rainfall itself, but multiple stations should be installed in order to obtain areal precipitation data required for hydrological analysis. On the other hand, a rainfall radar may provide areal distribution of rainfall in real time though it is an indirect measurement of radar echoes on rain drops. Rainfall radars have been shown useful especially for forecasting short-term localized torrential storms that may cause catastrophic flash floods. CAPPI (Constant Altitude Plan Position Indicator), which is one of the several types of radar rainfall image data, has been provided on the Internet in real time by Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA). It is one of the most widely available rainfall data in Korea with fairly high level of confidence as it is produced with bias adjustment and quality control procedures by KMA. The objective of this study is to develop an improved way to extract quantitative rainfall data applicable to even very small watersheds from CAPPI using CIVCOM, which is a new image processing method based on a vector-based scheme proposed in this study rather than raster-based schemes proposed by other researchers. This study shows usefulness of CIVCOM through comparison of rainfall data produced by image processing methods including traditional raster-based schemes and a newly proposed vector-based one.