• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.37 no.4
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• pp.815-831
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• 2021

Drought forecasting is crucial to minimize the damage to food security and water resources caused by drought. Satellite-based drought research has been conducted since 1980s, which includes drought monitoring, assessment, and prediction. Unlike numerous studies on drought monitoring and assessment for the past few decades, satellite-based drought forecasting has gained popularity in recent years. For successful drought forecasting, it is necessary to carefully identify the relationships between drought factors and drought conditions by drought type and lead time. This paper aims to provide an overview of recent research trends and challenges for satellite-based drought forecasts focusing on lead times. Based on the recent literature survey during the past decade, the satellite-based drought forecasting studies were divided into three groups by lead time (i.e., short-term, sub-seasonal, and seasonal) and reviewed with the characteristics of the predictors (i.e., drought factors) and predictands (i.e., drought indices). Then, three major challenges-difficulty in model generalization, model resolution and feature selection, and saturation of forecasting skill improvement-were discussed, which led to provide several future research directions of satellite-based drought forecasting.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.49 no.10
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• pp.877-885
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• 2016

In this study, the Standard Precipitation Index(SPI), meteorological drought index, was used to evaluate the temporal and spatial assessment of drought forecasting results for all cross Korea. For the drought forecasting, the Multi Layer Perceptron-Artificial Neural Network (MLP-ANN) was selected and the drought forecasting was performed according to different forecasting lead time for SPI (3) and SPI (6). The precipitation data observed in 59 gaging stations of Korea Meteorological Adminstration (KMA) from 1976~2015. For the performance evaluation of the drought forecasting, the binary classification confusion matrix, such as evaluating the status of drought occurrence based on threshold, was constituted. Then Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) score and F score according to conditional probability are computed. As a result of ROC analysis on forecasting performance, drought forecasting performance, of applying the MLP-ANN model, shows satisfactory forecasting results. Consequently, two-month and five-month leading forecasts were possible for SPI (3) and SPI (6), respectively.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2016.05a
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• pp.197-197
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• 2016

Forecasting future drought events in a region plays a major role in water management and risk assessment of drought occurrences. The creeping characteristics of drought make it possible to mitigate drought's effects with accurate forecasting models. Drought forecasts are inevitably plagued by uncertainties, making it necessary to derive forecasts in a probabilistic framework. In this study, a new probabilistic scheme is proposed to forecast droughts, in which a discrete-time finite state-space hidden Markov model (HMM) is used aggregated with the Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP) precipitation projection (HMM-RCP). The 3-month standardized precipitation index (SPI) is employed to assess the drought severity over the selected five stations in South Kore. A reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm is used for inference on the model parameters which includes several hidden states and the state specific parameters. We perform an RCP precipitation projection transformed SPI (RCP-SPI) weight-corrected post-processing for the HMM-based drought forecasting to derive a probabilistic forecast that considers uncertainties. Results showed that the HMM-RCP forecast mean values, as measured by forecasting skill scores, are much more accurate than those from conventional models and a climatology reference model at various lead times over the study sites. In addition, the probabilistic forecast verification technique, which includes the ranked probability skill score and the relative operating characteristic, is performed on the proposed model to check the performance. It is found that the HMM-RCP provides a probabilistic forecast with satisfactory evaluation for different drought severity categories, even with a long lead time. The overall results indicate that the proposed HMM-RCP shows a powerful skill for probabilistic drought forecasting.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2022.05a
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• pp.141-141
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• 2022

Drought is a global phenomenon that affects almost all landscapes and causes major damages. Due to non-linear nature of contributing factors, drought occurrence and its severity is characterized as stochastic in nature. Early warning of impending drought can aid in the development of drought mitigation strategies and measures. Thus, drought forecasting is crucial in the planning and management of water resource systems. The primary objective of this study is to make improvement is existing drought forecasting techniques. Therefore, we proposed an improved version of Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA) model (MD-SARIMA) for reliable drought forecasting with three years lead time. In this study, we selected four watersheds of Han River basin in South Korea to validate the performance of MD-SARIMA model. The meteorological data from 8 rain gauge stations were collected for the period 1973-2016 and converted into watershed scale using Thiessen's polygon method. The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) was employed to represent the meteorological drought at seasonal (3-month) time scale. The performance of MD-SARIMA model was compared with existing models such as Seasonal Naive Bayes (SNB) model, Exponential Smoothing (ES) model, Trigonometric seasonality, Box-Cox transformation, ARMA errors, Trend and Seasonal components (TBATS) model, and SARIMA model. The results showed that all the models were able to forecast drought, but the performance of MD-SARIMA was robust then other statistical models with Wilmott Index (WI) = 0.86, Mean Absolute Error (MAE) = 0.66, and Root mean square error (RMSE) = 0.80 for 36 months lead time forecast. The outcomes of this study indicated that the MD-SARIMA model can be utilized for drought forecasting.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2023.05a
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• pp.249-249
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• 2023

Spring drought forecasting in South Korea is essential due to the sknewness of rainfall which could lead to water shortage especially in spring when managed without prediction. Therefore, drought forecasting over South Korea was performed in the current study by thoroughly searching appropriate predictors from the lagged global climate variable, mean sea level pressure(MSLP), specifically in winter season for forecasting time lag. The target predictand defined as accumulated spring precipitation(ASP) was driven by the median of 93 weather stations in South Korea. Then, it was found that a number of points of the MSLP data were significantly cross-correlated with the ASP, and the points with high correlation were regionally grouped. The grouped variables with three regions: the Arctic Ocean (R1), South Pacific (R2), and South Africa (R3) were determined. The generalized linear model(GLM) was further applied for skewed marginal distribution in drought prediction. It was shown that the applied GLM presents reasonable performance in forecasting ASP. The results concluded that the presented regionalization of the climate variable, MSLP can be a good alternative in forecasting spring drought.

• Journal of The Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers
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• v.61 no.1
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• pp.61-74
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• 2019

In this study, the SPI (Standardized Precipitation Index) of meteorological drought and SDI (Streamflow Drought Index) of hydrological drought for 1, 3, 6, 9, and 12 months duration were estimated to analyse the characteristics of drought using rainfall and dam inflow data for Chungju dam ($6,661.8km^2$) with 31 years (1986-2016) and Boryeong dam ($163.6km^2$) watershed with 19 years (1998-2016) respectively. Using the estimated SPI and SDI, the drought forecasting was conducted using seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (SARIMA) model for the 5 durations. For 2016 drought, the SARIMA had a good results for 3 and 6 months. For the 3 months SARIMA forecasting of SPI and SDI, the correlation coefficient of SPI3, SPI6, SPI12, SDI1, and SDI6 at Chungju Dam showed 0.960, 0.990, 0.999, 0.868, and 0.846, respectively. Also, for same duration forecasting of SPI and SDI at Boryeong Dam, the correlation coefficient of SPI3, SPI6, SDI3, SDI6, and SDI12 showed 0.999, 0.994, 0.999, 0.880, and 0.992, respectively. The SARIMA model showed the possibility to provide the future short-term SPI meteorological drought and the resulting SDI hydrological drought.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.50 no.11
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• pp.769-779
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• 2017

As the occurrence of drought is recently on the rise, the reliable drought forecasting is required for developing the drought mitigation and proactive management of water resources. This study developed a probabilistic hydrological drought forecasting method using the Bayesian Networks and drought propagation relationship to estimate future drought with the forecast uncertainty, named as the Propagated Bayesian Networks Drought Forecasting (PBNDF) model. The proposed PBNDF model was composed with 4 nodes of past, current, multi-model ensemble (MME) forecasted information and the drought propagation relationship. Using Palmer Hydrological Drought Index (PHDI), the PBNDF model was applied to forecast the hydrological drought condition at 10 gauging stations in Nakdong River basin. The receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve analysis was applied to measure the forecast skill of the forecast mean values. The root mean squared error (RMSE) and skill score (SS) were employed to compare the forecast performance with previously developed forecast models (persistence forecast, Bayesian network drought forecast). We found that the forecast skill of PBNDF model showed better performance with low RMSE and high SS of 0.1~0.15. The overall results mean the PBNDF model had good potential in probabilistic drought forecasting.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.37 no.10
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• pp.837-844
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• 2004

In this study, the efficient reservoir operation is studied by comparing results from reservoir operation using a basin drought forecasting and warning system with an existing reservoir operation rule. As a result, it is found that the reliability and average annual storage of reservoir operation using a basin drought forecasting and warning system and release coefficients is better than those of reservoir operation using the existing operation rule. The release coefficients for Yongdam dam located in the Geum river basin selected as a case study are found to be the most effective for the value of 0.95 for the drought watch, 0.9 for the drought warning and 0.85 for the drought emergency. The reservoir operation using a drought forecasting and warning enables the use of the limited water resources effectively during drought and will contribute the national water resources management.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.46 no.12
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• pp.1249-1263
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• 2013

In order to minimize the damages caused by long-term drought, appropriate drought management plans of the basin should be established with the drought forecasting technology. Further, in order to build reasonable adaptive measurement for future drought, the duration and severity of drought must be predicted quantitatively in advance. Thus, this study, attempts to forecast drought in Korea by using an Artificial Neural Network Model, and drought index, which are the representative statistical approach most frequently used for hydrological time series forecasting. SPI (Standardized Precipitation Index) for major weather stations in Korea, estimated using observed historical precipitation, was used as input variables to the MLP (Multi Layer Perceptron) Neural Network model. Data set from 1976 to 2000 was selected as the training period for the parameter calibration and data from 2001 to 2010 was set as the validation period for the drought forecast. The optimal model for drought forecast determined by training process was applied to drought forecast using SPI (3), SPI (6) and SPI (12) over different forecasting lead time (1 to 6 months). Drought forecast with SPI (3) shows good result only in case of 1 month forecast lead time, SPI (6) shows good accordance with observed data for 1-3 months forecast lead time and SPI (12) shows relatively good results in case of up to 1~5 months forecast lead time. The analysis of this study shows that SPI (3) can be used for only 1-month short-term drought forecast. SPI (6) and SPI (12) have advantage over long-term drought forecast for 3~5 months lead time.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2015.05a
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• pp.225-225
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• 2015

Drought events usually evolve slowly in time and their impacts generally span a long period of time. This indicates that the sequence of drought is not completely random. The Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is a probabilistic model used to represent dependences between invisible hidden states which finally result in observations. Drought characteristics are dependent on the underlying generating mechanism, which can be well modelled by the HMM. This study employed a HMM with Gaussian emissions to fit the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) series and make multi-step prediction to check the drought characteristics in the future. To estimate the parameters of the HMM, we employed a Bayesian model computed via Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). Since the true number of hidden states is unknown, we fit the model with varying number of hidden states and used reversible jump to allow for transdimensional moves between models with different numbers of states. We applied the HMM to several stations SPI data in South Korea. The monthly SPI data from January 1973 to December 2012 was divided into two parts, the first 30-year SPI data (January 1973 to December 2002) was used for model calibration and the last 10-year SPI data (January 2003 to December 2012) for model validation. All the SPI data was preprocessed through the wavelet denoising and applied as the visible output in the HMM. Different lead time (T= 1, 3, 6, 12 months) forecasting performances were compared with conventional forecasting techniques (e.g., ANN and ARMA). Based on statistical evaluation performance, the HMM exhibited significant preferable results compared to conventional models with much larger forecasting skill score (about 0.3-0.6) and lower Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) values (about 0.5-0.9).