• Journal of The Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers
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• v.48 no.6
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• pp.3-13
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• 2006

Although the drought impacts are comparably not catastrophic, the results from the drought are fatal in various social and economical aspects. Different from other natural hazards including floods, drought advances slowly and spreads widely, so that the preparedness is quite important and effective to mitigate the impacts from drought. Soil moisture depletion directly resulted from rainfall shortage is highly related with drought, especially for crops and vegetations, therefore a drought can be evaluated using soil moisture conditions. In this study, SMI (Soil Moisture Index) was developed to measure a drought condition using soil moisture model and frequency analysis for return periods. Runs theory was applied to quantify the soil moisture depletions for the drought condition in terms of severity, magnitude and duration. In 1994, 1995, 2000, and 2001, Korea had experienced several severe droughts, so the SMI developed was applied to evaluate applicability in the mid-range hydrologic unit watershed scale. From the results, SMI demonstrated the drought conditions with a quite sensitive manner and can be used as an indicator to measure a drought condition.

• Journal of The Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers
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• v.59 no.3
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• pp.21-28
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• 2017

The main goal of this paper is to assess application of UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) remote sensing and GIS based images in detection and measuring of rice field drought area in South Korea. Drought is recurring feature of the climatic events, which often hit South Korea, bringing significant water shortages, local economic losses and adverse social consequences. This paper describes the assesment of the near-realtime drought damage monitoring and reporting system for the agricultural drought region. The system is being developed using drought-related vegetation characteristics, which are derived from UAV remote sensing data. The study area is $3.07km^2$ of Wonbuk-myeon, Taean-gun, Chungnam in South Korea. UAV images were acquired three times from July 4 to October 29, 2015. Three images of the same test site have been analysed by object-based image classification technique. Drought damaged paddy rices reached $754,362m^2$, which is 47.1 %. The NongHyeop Agricultural Damage Insurance accepted agricultural land of 4.6 % ($34,932m^2$). For paddy rices by UAV investigation, the drought monitoring and crop productivity was effective in improving drought assessment method.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.53 no.4
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• pp.285-291
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• 2020

The Noah 3.3 Land Surface Model (LSM) was used to estimate the global soil moisture in this study and these soil moisture datasets were assessed against satellite-based and reanalysis soil moisture products. The Noah 3.3 LSM simulated soil moistures in four soil layers and root-zone soil moistures defined as a depth-weighted average in the first three soil layers (i.e., up to 1.0 m deep). The Noah LSM soil moisture products were then compared with a satellite-based soil moisture dataset (European Space Agency Climate Change Initiatives (ESA CCI) SM v04.4) and reanalysis soil moisture datasets (ERA-interim). In addition, the five major basins (Yangtze, Mekong, Mississippi, Murray-Darling, Amazon) were selected for the assesment with the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE)-based Total Water Storage Anomaly (TWSA) and TWS Change (TWSC). The results revealed that high anomaly correlations were found in most of the Asia-Pacific regions including East Asia, South Asia, Australia, and Noth and South America. While the anomaly correlations in the Murray-Darling basin were somewhat low, relatively higher anomaly correlations in the other basins were found. It is concluded that this study can be useful for the development of soil moisture based drought indices and subsequently can be helpful to reduce damages from drought by timely providing an efficacious strategy.