• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.52 no.9
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• pp.627-635
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• 2019

In Korea, snow damage has been happened in the region with no snowfalls in history. Also, casual damage was caused by heavy snow. Therefore, policy about the Natural Disaster Reduction Comprehensive Plan has been changed to include the mitigation measures of snow damage. However, since heavy snow damage was not frequent, studies on snowfall have not been conducted in different points. The characteristics of snow data commonly are not same to the rainfall data. For example, some parts of the southern coastal areas are snowless during the year, so there is often no values or zero values among the annual maximum daily snow accumulation. The characteristics of this type of data is similar to the censored data. Indeed, Busan observation sites have more than 36% of no data or zero data. Despite of the different characteristics, the frequency analysis for snow data has been implemented according to the procedures for rainfall data. The frequency analysis could be implemented in both way to include the zero data or exclude the zero data. The fitness of both results would not be high enough to represent the real data shape. Therefore, in this study, a methodology for selecting a probability density function was suggested considering the characteristics of snow data in Korea. A method to select probability density function using conditional joint probability distribution was proposed. As a result, fitness from the proposed method was higher than the conventional methods. This shows that the conventional methods (includes 0 or excludes 0) overestimated snow depth. The results of this study can affect the design standards of buildings and also contribute to the establishment of measures to reduce snow damage.