• Journal of Wetlands Research
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.113-124
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• 2014

The observed rainfall may be different along with the altitude of rain gauge, resulting in the fact that the characteristics of rainfall events occurred in urban or mountainous areas are different. Due to the mountainous effects, in higher altitude, the uncertainty involved in the rainfall observation gets higher so that the density of rain gauges should be more dense. Basically, a methodology for the rain gauge network evaluation, considering this altitude effect of rain gauges can account for the mountainous effects and becomes an important step for forecasting flash flood and calibrating of the radar rainfall. For this reason, in this study, we suggest a methodology for rain gauge network evaluation with consideration of the rain gauge's altitude. To explore the density of rain gauges at each level of altitude, the Equal-Altitude-Ratio of the density of rain gauges, which is based on the fixed amount of elevation and the Equal-Area-Ratio of the density of rain gauges, which is based on the fixed amount of basin area are designed. After these two methods are applied to a real watershed, it is found that the Equal-Area-Ratio generates better results for evaluation of a rain gauge network with consideration of rain gauge's altitude than the Equal-Altitude-Ratio does. In addition, for comparison between the soundness of rain gauge networks in other watersheds, the Coefficient of Variation (CV) of the rain gauge density by the Equal-Area-Ratio is served as the index for the evenness of the distribution of the rain gauge's altitude. The suggested method is applied to the five large watersheds in Korea and it is found that rain gauges installed in a watershed having less value of the CV shows more evenly distributed than the ones in a watershed having higher value of the CV.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.40 no.11
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• pp.841-849
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• 2007

This study evaluated the effect of combined rainfall observation of using rain gauge and rain radar. The effect of combined observations is to be evaluated by considering the decrease of measurement error due to combined use of design orthogonal observation methods. As an example, this study evaluated the rain gauge network of the Keum river basin, and showed how the density of rain gauges could be decreased by combining the radar observation. This study applied the researches on sampling error by North and Nakamoto(1989), Yoo et al. (1996) and Yoo (1997), also the simple NFD model for representing the rainfall field. The model parameters were decided using the rainfall characteristics (correlation time and length) estimated using the data collected in the Keum River Basin by 28 rain gauges and the operation rule of radar was assumed arbitrarily. This study considered the rain gauge density criteria provided by WMO(1994) and the rain gauge density installed in the Keum river basin to decrease the rain gauge density under the condition of introducing the radar.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.42 no.6
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• pp.493-503
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• 2009

Estimation of the mean-field bias of radar rainfall is to determine the difference between the areal means of radar and rain gauge rainfall, where the rain gauge rainfall is assumed to be the truth. To exactly determine this bias, the variance of the difference between two observations must be small enough, thus, enough number of observations is indispensible. So, the problem becomes to determine the number of rain gauges to satisfy the level of variance of the difference between two observations. Especially, this study focuses on the case when the rain gauges are disproportionate spatially. This is the problem for the Ganghwa rain radar for the observation of rainfall within the Imjin river basin and the same problem also occurs when a radar is located in between land and ocean. This study considered the Imjin river basin, and compared two cases when rain gauges are available only within the downstream part, about one third of the whole basin, and over the whole basin. Based on the results derived, the rain gauge density within the downstream part of the Imjin river basin was proposed to secure the same accuracy obtained when the rain gauges are available over the whole Imjin river basin.

• Water Engineering Research
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.187-192
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• 2003

The rainfall observation systems have largely been improved in Japan. The Japan Meteorological Agency, prefecture governments, and other administrative bodies have also increased the number of rain gauges thru out the country. The density of observatories is now one per several $\km^2$. Heavy rainfall information systems have been improved. Besides it, the Internet was popularized in the late 1990s, and has been used to transmit data of heavy rainfall. Internet accessible cellular phones have been popular in Japan since 1999. Such phones are expected to be useful in the field of disaster warning announcements, because they can automatically notify users bye-mail of pending disasters. The use of the Internet during natural disasters is groundbreaking in Japan today. However, in order to use disaster information effectively on Internet it is necessary to investigate how to use the information during the rainfall disaster. Therefore in our study we suggest methods on the effective construction and their use of information technology on Internet.