• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.43 no.1
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• pp.110-118
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• 2022

Frequent drought damage has resulted in the polarization of water resources. In Korea, local periodic abnormal droughts continued to occur between 2011 and 2017, resulting in decreased water storage rates of small-scale reservoirs designed with a frequency of 10-year droughts. This decrease can degrade water quality and limit the use of already secured quantities. Therefore, to prepare for and overcome drought, quality management and recalculation of drought frequency are required. This study estimates the potential pollutants causing quality changes in the reservoir. In addition, it reviews the decrease in storage and consequent changes in the quality of a reservoir during drought.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2023.05a
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• pp.48-48
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• 2023

The intensified droughts under climate change are expected to threaten stable water resource availability. Droughts exceeding the magnitude of historical variability could occur increasingly frequently under future climate conditions. It is crucial to understand how drought will evolve over time because the assumption of hydrological stationarity of the past decades would be inappropriate for future water resources management. However, the timing of the emergence of unprecedented drought conditions under climate change has rarely been examined. Here, using multimodel hydrological simulations, we investigate the changes in the frequency of hydrological drought (defined as abnormally low river discharge) under high and low greenhouse gas concentration scenarios and with existing water resources management and estimate the timing of the first emergence of unprecedented regional drought conditions that persist for over several consecutive years. This new metric enables a new quantification of the urgency of adaptation and mitigation with regard to drought under climate change. The times are detected for several sub-continental-scale regions, and three regions, namely, southwestern South America, Mediterranean Europe, and northern Africa, exhibit particularly robust and earlier critical times under the high-emission scenario. These three regions are expected to confront unprecedented conditions within the next 30 years with a high likelihood, regardless of the emission scenarios. In addition, the results obtained herein demonstrate the benefits of the lower-emission pathway in reducing the likelihood of emergence. The Paris Agreement goals are shown to be effective in reducing the likelihood to the unlikely level in most regions. Nevertheless, appropriate and prior adaptation measures are considered indispensable to when facing unprecedented drought conditions. The results of this study underscore the importance of improving drought preparedness within the considered time horizons.

• Journal of The Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers
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• v.65 no.3
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• pp.57-67
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• 2023

A flash drought is a rapid-onset drought that develops over a short period of time as weather and environmental factors change rapidly, unlike general droughts, due to meteorological abnormalities. Abnormally high evapotranspiration rates and rapid declines in soil moisture increase vegetation stress. In addition, crop yields may decrease due to flash droughts during crop growth and may damage agricultural and economic ecosystems. In this study, Flash Drought Intensity Index (FDII) based on soil moisture data from Gravity Recovery Climate Experiment (GRACE) was used to analyze flash drought. FDII, which is calculated using soil moisture percentile, is expressed by multiplying two factors: the rate of intensification and the drought severity. FDII was developed for domestic flash drought events from 2014 to 2018. The flash drought that occurred in 2018, Chungcheongbuk-do showed the highest FDII. FDII was higher in heat wave flash drought than in precipitation deficit flash drought. The results of this study show that FDII is reliable flash drought analysis tool and can be applied to quantitatively analyze the characteristics of flash drought in South Korea.

• The Journal of Engineering Geology
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.241-256
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• 2023

Long-term droughts and frequent spring droughts are causing damage to crops, which are the means of livelihood of residents of the Yeoncheon region. To analyze the degree of drought in Yeoncheon, the ratio of monthly precipitation and discharge was reviewed through observed data, and the standardized precipitation index and streamflow drought index were calculated. As a result of drought analysis using precipitation and discharge observation stations near the Yeoncheon basin, it was analyzed that the drought that occurred in 2014 was common to all drought indices and that drought occurred continuously until 2019, either large or small. In the case of drought indices with a duration of 12 months, it is expected that the damage caused by the drought would be severe as the drought period lasted 24 months. In order to manage drought damage, it is important to understand and predict the current state of drought. In order to cope with drought in advance, it is urgent to implement an integrated operation management strategy for rivers and waterworks structures according to the degree and duration of drought.

• Journal of The Korean Society of Grassland and Forage Science
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• v.43 no.2
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• pp.103-108
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• 2023

Due to the recent impact of global warming, heavy rainfall and droughts have been occurring regardless of the season, affecting the growth of Italian ryegrass (IRG), a winter forage crop. Particularly, delayed sowing due to frequent heavy rainfall or autumn droughts leads to poor growth and reduced winter survival rates. Therefore, techniques to improve yield through additional sowing in spring have been implemented. In this study, the growth of IRG sown in Spring and Autumn was compared and analyzed using vegetation indices during the months of April and May. Spectral data was collected using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) equipped with a hyperspectral sensor, and the following vegetation indices were utilized: Normalized Difference Vegetation Index; NDVI, Normalized Difference Red Edge Index; NDRE (I), Chlorophyll Index, Red Green Ratio Index; RGRI, Enhanced Vegetation Index; EVI and Carotenoid Reflectance Index 1; CRI1. Indices related to chlorophyll concentration exhibited similar trends. RGRI of IRG sown in autumn increased during the experimental period, while IRG sown in spring showed a decreasing trend. The results of RGRI in IRG indicated differences in optical characteristics by sowing seasons compared to the other vegetation indices. Our findings showed that the timing of sowing influences the optical growth characteristics of crops by the results of various vegetation indices presented in this study. Further research, including the development of optimal vegetation indices related to IRG growth, is necessary in the future.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2022.05a
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• pp.305-305
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• 2022

A better approach for assessing meteorological drought occurrences is increasingly important in mitigating and adapting to the impacts of climate change, as well as strategies for developing early warning systems. The present study defines meteorological droughts as a period with an abnormal precipitation deficit based on monthly precipitation data of 18 gauging stations for the Han River watershed in the past (1974-2015). This study utilizes a Bayesian parameter estimation approach to analyze the effects of climate change on future drought (2025-2065) in the Han River Basin using the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) with four bias-corrected general circulation models (GCMs) under the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP)2-4.5 scenario. Given that drought is defined by several dependent variables, the evaluation of this phenomenon should be based on multivariate analysis. Two main characteristics of drought (severity and duration) were extracted from precipitation anomalies in the past and near-future periods using the copula function. Three parameters of the Archimedean family copulas, Frank, Clayton, and Gumbel copula, were selected to fit with drought severity and duration. The results reveal that the lower parts and middle of the Han River basin have faced severe drought conditions in the near future. Also, the bivariate analysis using copula showed that, according to both indicators, the study area would experience droughts with greater severity and duration in the future as compared with the historical period.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2022.05a
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• pp.158-158
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• 2022

Ecological drought consequences have received a lot of attention in recent years. Thus, ecological drought was proposed as a new drought category to characterize the impact of drought on ecosystems. The current study used a unique drought index, the standardized supply-demand water index (SSDI), and a run theory to detect ecological drought occurrences and characteristics such as drought-affected area, drought severity, drought duration, drought frequency, and drought orientation in the Hwang River, an environmentally valuable region. Hence, to assess drought-prone areas, the bivariate probability and return period will be calculated using a two-dimensional joint copula. The core results show that (a) the Spatio-temporal characteristics of ecological drought were successfully recognized using the spatial and temporal identification approach; (b) in comparison to the SPEI meteorological drought index, the SSDI is more credible and can more readily and effectively capture the entire properties of ecological drought information; (c) the Hwang river had seen the most severe drought occurrences between the late 1990s and the mid-2020s, with 48.3 percent occurring before the twenty-first century; (d) Severe ecological drought occurrences occurred more frequently in most areas of the Hwang River (e) Only the drought duration and severity in the Hwang area were more responsive to temperature when temperatures rise around 1.1℃, the average drought duration and severity rise around 16 % and 26 %, respectively. This suggested that the Hwang River has been exposed to more severe heat stress in the twenty-first century. Thereupon droughts in the twenty-first century occurred with bigger affected regions, longer durations, higher frequency, and more intensity.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2022.05a
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• pp.450-450
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• 2022

The study aims to develop scenarios for efficient groundwater use using existing wells in order to prepare for an eventual drought. In the recent decades, droughts are not only intensifying, but they are also spreading into territories where droughts used to be less intense and relatively infrequent. With the increasing disaster, efficient groundwater use is urgently needed not only to prevent the problem of groundwater depletion but also drought risk reduction. Thus, the research addressed the problem of efficient aquifer use as source of water during drought and emergencies. The research focused on well network system applied to Yanggok-ri in Korea using simulation models in visual MODFLOW. The approach consists to variate groundwater pumping rate in the most important wells used for irrigation across the study area and evaluate the pumping effect on water level fluctuation. From the evaluation, the pumping period, appropriate pumping rate of each well and the most vulnerable wells are determined for a better groundwater management. The project results divide the study area into two different regions (A and B), where the wells in the region A (western part of the region) show a crucial drop in water level from May to early July and in august as consequence of water pumping. While wells in region B are also showing a drawdown in groundwater level but relatively less compare to region A. The project suggests a scenarios of wells which should operate considering water demand, groundwater level depletion and daily pumping rate. Well Network System in relevant project, by pumping in another well where water is more abundant and keep the fixed storage in region A, is a measure to improve preparedness to reduce eventual disaster. The improving preparedness measure from the project, indicates its implication to better groundwater management.

• Journal of The Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers
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• v.65 no.5
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• pp.13-24
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• 2023

Due to recent climate change, the amount of rainfall during the summer season in South Korea has been decreasing, leading to an increase in areas affected by frequent droughts. Droughts have the characteristic of occurring over a wide area and being unpredictable in terms of their onset and end, necessitating proactive research to cope with them. In this study, we conducted an assessment of agricultural drought vulnerability in Taean-gun, Chungcheongnam-do, focusing on irrigation facilities and paddy fields. The assessment criteria were meteorological impact, drought occurrence status, supplementary water supply capacity, and drought response capability, with nine specific indicators selected. The drought response capability was analyzed by applying a scoring system as a key component of the agricultural drought vulnerability assessment, while the other indicators were quantified using an entropy weighting technique. The results of the assessment showed that Anmyeon-eup and Taean-eup were the safest areas, while Wonbuk-myeon, Nam-myeon, and Gonam-myeon were the most vulnerable. It is expected that the findings can be utilized to enhance understanding and proactive measures for coping with agricultural drought, and to determine the priority of drought response in different regions.

• Proceedings of the KSR Conference
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• 2011.10a
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• pp.2902-2909
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• 2011

Regional torrential rains in summer this year due to abnormal climate changes compared to last year, have been frequent. Since Typhoon Rusa and Typhoon Maemi resulted in major damage to railroad facilities in 2002 and 2003 consecutively, problems with abnormal climate changes became a global problem including railroad and floods and droughts around the globe, heavy snow and winter warming have been repeated until now. Serious problem of radiation leakage in Fukushima nuclear power plant by the Tsunami due to 9.0-scale earthquake, this year in March, in northeastern Japan happened, and has given an impact on the life of Japanese citizens and industries and has also influenced on Korean. This shows how important to secure and to protect major national facilities including railroad structures to natural disasters such as earthquake. Therefore, we will briefly discuss about technologies for securing and protecting railroad structures to earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters.