• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2019.05a
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• pp.24-24
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• 2019

This study investigates variations in the Western Pacific Subtropical High (WPSH) and its impact on South Korean precipitation in late summer during the period between 1958 and 2017. Composite analysis reveals that precipitation occurrence is directly linked to the displacement of the WPSH western ridge, a single, large-scale feature of the atmosphere in the Pacific Ocean. When WPSH ridging is located northwest (NW) of its climatological mean position, excessive precipitation is expected in late summer due to enhanced moisture transport. On the other hand, a precipitation deficit is frequently observed when the western ridge is located in the southeast (SE). Different phases of the WPSH are associated with lagged patterns of Pacific and Atlantic atmospheric and oceanic variability, introducing the potential to predict variability in the WPSH western ridge and its climate over northern East Asia by one month. Based on the identified SST patterns, a simple statistical model is developed and improvement in the ability to predict is confirmed through a cross-validation framework. Finally, the potential for further improvements in WPSH-based predictions is addressed.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.16-23
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• 2000

A topography-precipitation relationship derived from the southern part of Korean Peninsula was applied to North Korea where climate stations are few and widely separated. Two hundred and seventy seven rain gauge stations of South Korea were classified into 8 different groups depending on the slope orientation (aspect) of the region they are located. Monthly precipitation averaged over 10 year period (1986-1995) was regressed to topographical variables of the station locations. A 'trend precipitation' for each gauge station was extracted from the precipitation surface interpolated from the monthly precipitation data of 24 standard stations of the Korea Meteorological Administration and used as a substitute for y-axis intercept of the regression equation. These regression models were applied to the corresponding regions of North Korea, which were identified by slope orientation, to obtain monthly precipitation surface for the aspect regions. 'Trend precipitation' from the 10 year data of 27 North Korean standard stations was also used in the model calculation. Output grids for each aspect region were mosaicked to form the monthly and annual precipitation surface with a 1km$\times$1km resolution for the entire territory of North Korea. Spatially averaged annual precipitation of North Korea was 938 mm with the standard deviation of 246 mm.

• Journal of the Korean Association of Geographic Information Studies
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.208-219
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• 2020

This study aims to determine the applicability of satellite precipitation to the ungauged or inaccessible areas by comparing the accuracy of satellite precipitation. The accuracy assessment showed that the overall spatial distributions of ground-based rainfall and satellite precipitation were similar in all three events. For one-month precipitation with one-hour temporal resolution, the correlations between ground-based precipitation (ASOS) and satellite precipitation were analyzed to be between 0.42 and 0.46. In the evaluation during the period in which precipitation was concentrated, the correlation coefficients for one-hour temporal resolution data were analyzed as 0.55 to 0.66 for IMERG and 0.56 to 0.67 for GSMAP. According to the total rainfall analysis of each rainfall station for the three events, the correlation coefficients of IMERG and GSMaP were relatively better than CMORPH, and the bias of CMORPH data was relatively better than IMERG and GSMaP. However, all the three satellite precipitation were underestimated compared to the ground-based precipitation. In the future, a study will be carried out to estimate precipitation across the Korean Peninsula, including North Korea, reflecting the results from this study.

• Journal of Multimedia Information System
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.245-256
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• 2018

This study estimated rainfall information more effectively by image signals through the information system of weather radar. Based on this, we suggest the way to estimate quantitative precipitation utilizing overlapped observation area of radars. We used the overlapped observation range of ground hyetometer observation network and radar observation network which are dense in our country. We chose the southern coast where precipitation entered from seaside is quite frequent and used Sungsan radar installed in Jeju island and Gudoksan radar installed in the southern coast area. We used the rainy season data generated in 2010 as the precipitation data. As a result, we found a reflectivity bias between two radar located in different area and developed the new quantitative precipitation estimation method using the bias. Estimated radar rainfall from this method showed the apt radar rainfall estimate than the other results from conventional method at overall rainfall field.

• Journal of The Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers
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• v.62 no.2
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• pp.39-52
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• 2020

A high quality, long-term, high-resolution precipitation dataset is an essential in climate analyses and global water cycles. Rainfall data from station observations are inadequate over many parts of the world, especially North Korea, due to non-existent observation networks, or limited reporting of gauge observations. As a result, satellite-based rainfall estimates have been used as an alternative as a supplement to station observations. The Climate Hazards Group Infrared Precipitation (CHIRP) and CHIRP combined with station observations (CHIRPS) are recently produced satellite-based rainfall products with relatively high spatial and temporal resolutions and global coverage. CHIRPS is a global precipitation product and is made available at daily to seasonal time scales with a spatial resolution of 0.05° and a 1981 to near real-time period of record. In this study, we analyze the applicability of CHIRPS data on the Korean Peninsula by supplementing the lack of precipitation data of North Korea. We compared the daily precipitation estimates from CHIRPS with 81 rain gauges across Korea using several statistical metrics in the long-term period of 1981-2017. To summarize the results, the CHIRPS product for the Korean Peninsula was shown an acceptable performance when it is used for hydrological applications based on monthly rainfall amounts. Overall, this study concludes that CHIRPS can be a valuable complement to gauge precipitation data for estimating precipitation and climate, hydrological application, for example, drought monitoring in this region.

• Journal of the Korean Data and Information Science Society
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.245-254
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• 2014

The traditional methods of simulating daily precipitation have paid little attention to the inherent dependence structure between the total precipitation amount and the precipitation frequency for a fixed period of time. To address this issue, we propose a new simulation algorithm using copula in order to incorporate the dependence into the traditional methods. The algorithm consists of two parts: First, while reflecting the observed dependence, we generate the total precipitation amount (S) and the frequency (N) during the period of interest; then we simulate the daily precipitation whose aggregation matches the pair of (N; S) generated in the first part. Our result shows that the proposed method substantially improves the traditional methods.

• Journal of Environmental Science International
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• v.15 no.12
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• pp.1125-1139
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• 2006

The cluster analysis of diurnal precipitation patterns is performed by using daily precipitation of 59 stations in South Korea from 1973 to 1996 in four seasons of each year. Four seasons are shifted forward by 15 days compared to the general ones. Number of clusters are 15 in winter, 16 in spring and autumn, and 26 in summer, respectively. One of the classes is the totally dry day in each season, indicating that precipitation is never observed at any station. This is treated separately in this study. Distribution of the days among the clusters is rather uneven with rather low area-mean precipitation occurring most frequently. These 4 (seasons)$\times$2 (wet and dry days) classes represent more than the half (59 %) of all days of the year. On the other hand, even the smallest seasonal clusters show at least $5\sim9$ members in the 24 years (1973-1996) period of classification. The cluster analysis is directly performed for the major $5\sim8$ non-correlated coefficients of the diurnal precipitation patterns obtained by factor analysis In order to consider the spatial correlation. More specifically, hierarchical clustering based on Euclidean distance and Ward's method of agglomeration is applied. The relative variance explained by the clustering is as high as average (63%) with better capability in spring (66%) and winter (69 %), but lower than average in autumn (60%) and summer (59%). Through applying weighted relative variances, i.e. dividing the squared deviations by the cluster averages, we obtain even better values, i.e 78 % in average, compared to the same index without clustering. This means that the highest variance remains in the clusters with more precipitation. Besides all statistics necessary for the validation of the final classification, 4 cluster centers are mapped for each season to illustrate the range of typical extremities, paired according to their area mean precipitation or negative pattern correlation. Possible alternatives of the performed classification and reasons for their rejection are also discussed with inclusion of a wide spectrum of recommended applications.

• Atmosphere
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.241-253
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• 2007

This paper investigates summer precipitation change in East Asia according to switching surface boundary condition over South Korea and Shantung. Simulations are carried out by ECHO-G/S for 20 years (1980-1999). Surface condition over both areas in ECHO-G/S is represented by ocean (OCN experiment). In OCN experiment, the summer precipitation is considerably underestimated around the Korean peninsula (the dry region) and overestimated over the eastern Tibetan Plateau (the wet region). It may be related that the lack of the heat sources from the unrealistically prescribed land-sea mask weakens northward expansion of rainband and the development of convective precipitation. Moreover the simulated rainband retreats before June in connection with the early genesis of summer monsoon circulation. The systematic bias of the summer precipitation over the dry and wet regions are reduced comparing with the OCN experiment when the land-sea masks over South Korea and Shantung are realistically considered as land (LND experiment). These improvements can be explained by the thermodynamical dissimilarity between land and ocean. Enhanced warming by switching the areas from sea to land has led to develop the thermal low over Yellow Sea with the cyclonic circulation. Thus, this cyclonic circulation supports moistures from the south to the dry region and blocks to the wet region. The heat transport from the land surface to atmosphere plays a key role in the developing convective precipitation in local scale and maintaining the precipitation and the rainband. Therefore, this results indicate that the design of the realistic land-sea distribution is required for the accurate simulation of the regional precipitation.

• Journal of Environmental Science International
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.141-152
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• 1996

This study is an attempt to investigate the chemical components of precipitation and its variation according to surface wind. Precipitation samples were collected by an wet-only precipitation sampler during the period of October 1994 to September 1995 at Kyungsan in Korea. The results obtained in t체s study are summerized as follows. The annual average of precipitation pH is 5.0, the highest month of pH is July of 5.5, and the lowest month of pH is December of 4.4. The most frequent appearance is in the range of pH 5.0 to 5.5 and its rate is 56.8%, The order of ion concentration In precipitation is SO42->NO3->Cl- in case of anion and $Ca^{2+}$>$NH_4^{+}$>$Na^+$>$Mg^{2+}$ in case of cation. It is found from our analysis that the correlation coefficient among the precipitation pH and ion components is below r=0.3, while the correlation coefficient between $SO_4^{2-}$ and NO_3^{-}$, $Na^+$ and $Cl^+$ is above r=0.8, respectively. The mean pH of precipitation is 4.8 under the westerly wind and 5.2 under the easterly wind. The concentrations of anion and cation under the westerly wind are more than the concentrations under the easterly wind. In autumn, the concentration of Na+ and $Cl^+$ under the easterly wind are higher than the concentration under the westerly wind. The correlation coefficients between wind speed and pH, ion components show very low correlation of -0.41 r 0.2. But the present study show that the correlation coefficient between wind speed and pH of precipitation is positive and the correlation coefficients between wind speed and ion concentration is negative.

• Atmosphere
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.279-285
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• 2012

The weighing precipitation gauge with auto-empting capability was developed in the R&D project organized by the Research Agency for Climate Science (RACS) and supported by the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA). This project was initiated in line with the KMA's plan executed since 2010 to introduce the weighing precipitation gauges partly into of their Automatic Weather Station (AWS) network in order to upgrade the quality of precipitation data. The innovative feature of this research is that the auto-empting in weighing precipitation gauge is realized by abrupt rotation of receiving container. The prototype was tested in compliance with the relevant standards of KMA. The results of performance test on rainfall measurement in laboratory verified that the accuracies for 20 mm and 100 mm reference rainfall amount were 0.1 mm and 0.4 mm, respectively in both conditions of auto-empting and no-empting. During the rotation of container for auto-empting, the data was extrapolated smoothly by applying the same precipitation intensity of the previous 10 sec. Consequently, it was found that the auto-empting precipitation gauge developed in this research is quite enough to be used for the operational purpose of accurate measurement with 0.1 mm resolution, regardless of the precipitation intensity.