• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.53 no.8
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• pp.569-582
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• 2020

Recently, Korea has faced a change in the pattern of water use due to urbanization, which has caused difficulties in understanding the rainfall-runoff process and optimizing the allocation of available water resources. In this perspective, spatially downscaled analysis of the water balance is required for the efficient operation of water resources in the National Water Management Plan and the River Basin Water Resource Management Plan. However, the existing water balance analysis does not fully consider water circulation and availability in the basin, thus, the obtained results provide limited information in terms of decision making. This study aims at developing a novel water circulation analysis model that is designed to support a quasi-real-time assessment of water availability along the river. The water circulation model proposed in this study improved the problems that appear in the existing water balance analysis. More importantly, the results showed a significant improvement over the existing model, especially in the low flow simulation. The proposed modeling framework is expected to provide primary information for more realistic hydrological drought monitoring and drought countermeasures by providing streamflow information in quasi-real-time through a more accurate natural flow estimation approach with highly complex network.