• Journal of the Korean earth science society
• /
• v.39 no.4
• /
• pp.327-341
• /
• 2018

Extreme temperatures and precipitations are expected to be more frequently occurring due to the ongoing global warming over the Korean Peninsula. However, few studies have analyzed the synoptic weather patterns associated with extreme events in a warming world. Here, the atmospheric patterns related to future extreme events are first analyzed using the HadGEM3-RA regional climate model. Simulations showed that the variability of temperature and precipitation will increase in the future (2051-2100) compared to the present (1981-2005), accompanying the more frequent occurrence of extreme events. Warm advection from East China and lower latitudes, a stagnant anticyclone, and local foehn wind are responsible for the extreme temperature (daily T>$38^{\circ}C$) episodes in Korea. The extreme precipitation cases (>$500mm\;day^{-1}$) were mainly caused by mid-latitude cyclones approaching the Korean Peninsula, along with the enhanced Changma front by supplying water vapor into the East China Sea. These future synoptic-scale features are similar to those of present extreme events. Therefore, our results suggest that, in order to accurately understand future extreme events, we should consider not only the effects of anthropogenic greenhouse gases or aerosol increases, but also small-scale topographic conditions and the internal variations of climate systems.

• Atmosphere
• /
• v.34 no.3
• /
• pp.257-271
• /
• 2024

In 2023, the World Meteorological Organization released a report on climate conditions in Asia, highlighting the region's high vulnerability to floods and the increasing severity and frequency of extreme precipitation events. While previous studies have largely concentrated on broader-scale phenomena such as the Asian monsoon, it is crucial to investigate the substantial characteristics of extreme precipitation for a better understanding. In this study, we analyze the spatiotemporal characteristics of extreme precipitation during summer and their affecting factors by decomposing the moisture budgets within specific Asian regions over 44 years (1979~2022). Our findings indicate that dynamic convergence terms (DY CON), which reflect changes in wind patterns, primarily drive extreme rainfall across much of Asia. In southern Asian sub-regions, particularly coastal areas, extreme precipitation is primarily driven by low-pressure systems, with DY CON accounting for 70% of the variance. However, in eastern Asia, both thermodynamic advection and nonlinear convergence terms significantly contribute to extreme precipitation. Notably, on the Korean Peninsula, thermodynamic advection plays an important role, driven by substantial moisture carried by strong southerly mean flow. Understanding these distinct characteristics of extreme rainfall across sub-regions is expected to enhance both predictability and resilience.

• Atmosphere
• /
• v.32 no.1
• /
• pp.1-15
• /
• 2022

Recently, Japan's Meteorological Research Institute presented the d4PDF database (Database for Policy Decision-Making for Future Climate Change, d4PDF) through large-scale climate ensemble simulations to overcome uncertainty arising from variability when the general circulation model represents extreme-scale precipitation. In this study, the change of precipitation characteristics between the historical and future climate conditions in the Yongdam-dam basin was analyzed using the d4PDF data. The result shows that annual mean precipitation and seasonal mean precipitation increased by more than 10% in future climate conditions. This study also performed an analysis on the change of the return period rainfall. The annual maximum daily rainfall was extracted for each climatic condition, and the rainfall with each return period was estimated. In this process, we represent the extreme-scale rainfall corresponding to a very long return period without any statistical model and method as the d4PDF provides rainfall data during 3,000 years for historical climate conditions and during 5,400 years for future climate conditions. The rainfall with a 50-year return period under future climate conditions exceeded the rainfall with a 100-year return period under historical climate conditions. Consequently, in future climate conditions, the magnitude of rainfall increased at the same return period and, the return period decreased at the same magnitude of rainfall. In this study, by using the d4PDF data, it was possible to analyze the change in extreme magnitude of rainfall.

• Journal of The Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers
• /
• v.54 no.5
• /
• pp.141-153
• /
• 2012

In this study, we estimated probable precipitation amounts at the target year (2020, 2030, 2040) of 55 weather stations in Korea using the 24 hour annual maximum precipitation data from 1973 through 2009 which should be useful for management of agricultural reservoirs. Not only trend tests but also non-stationary tests were performed and non-stationary frequency analysis were conducted to all of 55 sites. Gumbel distribution was chosen and probability weighted moment method was used to estimate model parameters. The behavior of the mean of extreme precipitation data, scale parameter, and location parameter were analyzed. The probable precipitation amount at the target year was estimated by a non-stationary frequency analysis using the linear regression analysis for the mean of extreme precipitation data, scale parameter, and location parameter. Overall results demonstrated that the probable precipitation amounts using the non-stationary frequency analysis were overestimated. There were large increase of the probable precipitation amounts of middle part of Korea and decrease at several sites in Southern part. The non-stationary frequency analysis using a linear model should be applicable to relatively short projection periods.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
• /
• 2015.05a
• /
• pp.537-537
• /
• 2015

In recent decades, the independence and identical distribution (iid) assumption for extreme events has been shown to be invalid in many cases because long-term climate variability resulting from phenomena such as the Pacific decadal variability and El Nino-Southern Oscillation may induce varying meteorological systems such as persistent wet years and dry years. Therefore, in the current study we propose a new parameter estimation method for probability distribution models to more accurately predict the magnitude of future extreme events when the iid assumption of probability distributions for large-scale climate variability is not adequate. The proposed parameter estimation is based on a metaheuristic approach and is derived from the objective function of the rth power probability-weighted sum of observations in increasing order. The combination of two distributions, gamma and generalized extreme value (GEV), was fitted to the GEV distribution in a simulation study. In addition, a case study examining the annual hourly maximum precipitation of all stations in South Korea was performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. The results of the simulation study and case study indicate that the proposed metaheuristic parameter estimation method is an effective alternative for accurately selecting the rth power when the iid assumption of extreme hydrometeorological events is not valid for large-scale climate variability. The maximum likelihood estimate is more accurate with a low mixing probability, and the probability-weighted moment method is a moderately effective option.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
• /
• v.30 no.1
• /
• pp.83-107
• /
• 2014

This study presents spatial characteristics of cloud using satellite image in the extreme heavy snowfall of the Yeongdong region. 3 extreme heavy snowfall events in the Yeongdong region during the recent 12 years (2001 ~ 2012) are selected for which the fresh snow cover exceed 50 cm/day. Spatial characteristics (minimum brightness temperature; Tmin, cloud size, center of cloud-cell) of cloud are analyzed by tracking main cloud-cell related with these events. These characteristics are compared with radar precipitation in the Yeongdong region to investigate relationship between cloud and precipitation. The results are summarized as follows, selected extreme heavy snowfall events are associated with the isolated, well-developed, and small-scale convective cloud which is developing over the Yeongdong region or moving from over East Korea Bay to the Yeongdong region. During the period of main precipitation, cloud-cell Tmin is low ($-40{\sim}-50^{\circ}C$) and cloud area is small (17,000 ~ 40,000 $km^2$). Precipitation area (${\geq}$ 0.5 mm/hr) from radar also shows small and isolated shape (4,000 ~ 8,000 $km^2$). The locations of the cloud and precipitation are similar, but in there centers are located closely to the coast of the Yeongdong region. In all events the extreme heavy snowfall occur in the period a developed cloud-cell was moving into the coastal waters of the Yeongdong. However, it was found that developing stage of cloud and precipitation are not well matched each other in one of 3 events. Water vapor image shows that cloud-cell is developed on the northern edge of the dry(dark) region. Therefore, at the result analyzed from cloud and precipitation, selected extreme heavy snowfall events are associated with small-scale secondary cyclone or vortex, not explosive polar low. Detection and tracking small-scale cloud-cell in the real-time forecasting of the Yeongdong extreme heavy snowfall is important.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
• /
• 2023.05a
• /
• pp.158-158
• /
• 2023

Characterizing the performance of precipitation (hereafter PRE) products in estimating the uncertainties in daily PRE in the era of global warming is of great value to the ecosystem's sustainability and human survival. This study intercompares the performance of different PRE products (gauge-based, satellite and reanalysis) sourced from the Frequent Rainfall Observations on GridS (FROGS) database over diverse climate zones in Africa and identifies regions where they depict minimal uncertainties in order to build optimal maps as a guide for different climate users. This is achieved by utilizing various techniques, including the triple collection (TC) approach, to assess the capabilities and limitations of different PRE products over nine climatic zones over the continent. For daily scale analysis, the uncertainties in light PRE (0.1 5mm/day) are prevalent over most regions in Africa during the study duration (2001-2016). Estimating the occurrence of extreme PRE events based on daily PRE 90th percentile suggests that extreme PRE is mainly detected over central Africa (CAF) region and some coastal regions of west Africa (WAF) where the majority of uncorrected satellite products show good agreement. The detection of PRE days and non-PRE days based on categorical statistics suggests that a perfect POD/FAR score is unattainable irrespective of the product type. Daily PRE uncertainties determined based on quantitative metrics show that consistent, satisfactory performance is demonstrated by the IMERG products (uncorrected), ARCv2, CHIRPSv2, 3B42v7.0 and PERSIANN_CDRv1r1 (corrected), and GPCC, CPC_v1.0, and REGEN_ALL (gauge) during the study period. The optimal maps that show the classification of products in regions where they depict reliable performance can be recommended for various usage for different stakeholders.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
• /
• 2015.05a
• /
• pp.247-247
• /
• 2015

Global Climate Model (GCM) is too coarse to apply at a basin scale. The spatial downcsaling is needed to used to permit the assessment of the hydrological changes of a basin. Furthermore, temporal downscaling is required to obtain hourly precipitation to analyze a small or medium basin because only few or several hours are used to determine the peak flows after it rains. In the current study, the spariotemporal distribution of downscaled hourly precipitation for RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios over South Korea is presented as well as its implications over hydrologica responses. Mean hourly precipitation significantly increases over the southern part of South Korea, especially during the morning time, and its increase becomes lower at later times of day in the RCP8.5 scenario. However, this increase cannot be propagated to the mainland due to the mountainous areas in the southern part of the country. Furthermore, the hydrological responses employing a distributed rainfall-runoff model show that there is a significant increase in the peak flow for the RCP8.5 scenario with a slight decrease for the RCP4.5 scenario. The current study concludes that the employed temporal downscaling method is suitable for obtaining the hourly precipitation data from daily GCM scenarios. In addition, the rainfall runoff simulation through the downscaled hourly precipitation is useful for investigating variations in the hydrological responses as related to future scenarios.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
• /
• v.50 no.2
• /
• pp.75-87
• /
• 2017

In recent decades, extreme events have been significantly increased over the Korean Peninsula due to climate variability and climate change. The potential changes in hydrologic cycle associated with the extreme events increase uncertainty in water resources planning and designing. For these reasons, a reliable changing point analysis is generally required to better understand regime changes in hydrologic time series at watershed scale. In this study, a hierarchical changing point analysis approach that can apply in a watershed scale is developed by combining the existing changing point analysis method and hierarchical Bayesian method. The proposed model was applied to the selected stations that have annual rainfall data longer than 40 years. The results showed that the proposed model can quantitatively detect the shift in precipitation in the middle of 1990s and identify the increase in annual precipitation compared to the several decades prior to the 1990s. Finally, we explored the changes in precipitation and sea level pressure in the context of large-scale climate anomalies using reanalysis data, for a given change point. It was concluded that the identified large-scale patterns were substantially different from each other.

• Journal of The Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers
• /
• v.57 no.5
• /
• pp.139-152
• /
• 2015

Along with climate change, it is reported that the scale and frequency of extreme climate events show unstable tendency of increase. Thus, to comprehend the change characteristics of precipitation data, it is needed to consider non-stationary. The main objectives of this study were to estimate future design floods for Wonpyeongcheon watershed based on RCP (Representative Concentration Pathways) scenario. Wonpyeongcheon located in the Keum River watershed was selected as the study area. Historical precipitation data of the past 35 years (1976~2010) were collected from the Jeonju meteorological station. Future precipitation data based on RCP4.5 were also obtained for the period of 2011~2100. Systematic bias between observed and simulated data were corrected using the quantile mapping (QM) method. The parameters for the bias-correction were estimated by non-parametric method. A non-stationary frequency analysis was conducted with moving average method which derives change characteristics of generalized extreme value (GEV) distribution parameters. Design floods for different durations and frequencies were estimated using rational formula. As the result, the GEV parameters (location and scale) showed an upward tendency indicating the increase of quantity and fluctuation of an extreme precipitation in the future. The probable rainfall and design flood based on non-stationarity showed higher values than those of stationarity assumption by 1.2%~54.9% and 3.6%~54.9%, respectively, thus empathizing the necessity of non-stationary frequency analysis. The study findings are expected to be used as a basis to analyze the impacts of climate change and to reconsider the future design criteria of Wonpyeongcheon watershed.