• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• 1998.09a
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• pp.286-291
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• 1998

SAR has provided weather independent images on land and sea surface, which can be used for extracting various useful informations. Recently attempts to estimate wind field parameters from SAR images over the oceans have been made by various groups over the world. Although scatterometer loaded in ERS-1 and ERS-2 observes the global wind vector field at spatial resolution of 50 Km with accuracies of $\pm$2m/s in speed, the spatial resolution may not be good enough for applications in coastal regions. It is weil known the sea surface roughness is closely correlated to the wind field, but the wind retrieval algorithms from SAR images are yet in developing stage. Since the radar backscattering properties of the SAR images are principally the same as that of scatterometer, some previous studies conducted by other groups report the success in mesoscale coastal wind field retrievals using ERS SAR images. We have tested SWA (SAR Wind Algorithm) and CMOD4 model for estimation of wind speed using an ERS-1 SAR image acquired near Cheju Island, Korea, in October 11, 1994. The precise estimation of sigma nought and the direction of wind are required for applying the CMOD4 model to estimate wind speed. The wind speed in the test sub-image is estimated to be about 10.5m/s, which relatively well agrees to the observed wind speed about 9.0m/s at Seoguipo station. The wind speed estimation through the SWA is slightly higher than that of CMOD4 model. The sea surface condition may be favorable to SWA on the specific date. Since the CMOD4 model requires either wind direction or wind speed to retrieve the wind field, we should estimate the wind speed first using other algorithm including SWA. So far, it is not conclusive if the SWA can be used to provide input wind speed data for CMOD4 model or not. Since it is only initial stage of implementing the wind field retrieval algorithms and no in-situ observed data is currently avaliable, we are not able to evaluate the accuracy of the results at the moment. Therefore verification studies should be followed in the future to extract reliable wind field information in the coastal region using ERS SAR images.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.56 no.8
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• pp.497-508
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• 2023

Agricultural reservoirs are crucial structures for water resources monitoring especially in Korea where the resources are seasonally unevenly distributed. Optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites, being utilized as tools for monitoring the reservoirs, have unique limitations in that optical sensors are sensitive to weather conditions and SAR sensors are sensitive to noises and multiple scattering over dense vegetations. In this study, we tried to improve water body detection accuracy through optical-SAR data fusion, and quantitatively analyze the complementary effects. We first detected water bodies at Edong, Cheontae reservoir using the Compact Advanced Satellite 500(CAS500), Kompsat-3/3A, and Sentinel-2 derived Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI), and SAR backscattering coefficient from Sentinel-1 by K-means clustering technique. After that, the improvements in accuracies were analyzed by applying K-means clustering to the 2-D grid space consists of NDWI and SAR. Kompsat-3/3A was found to have the best accuracy (0.98 at both reservoirs), followed by Sentinel-2(0.83 at Edong, 0.97 at Cheontae), Sentinel-1(both 0.93), and CAS500(0.69, 0.78). By applying K-means clustering to the 2-D space at Cheontae reservoir, accuracy of CAS500 was improved around 22%(resulting accuracy: 0.95) with improve in precision (85%) and degradation in recall (14%). Precision of Kompsat-3A (Sentinel-2) was improved 3%(5%), and recall was degraded 4%(7%). More precise water resources monitoring is expected to be possible with developments of high-resolution SAR satellites including CAS500-5, developments of image fusion and water body detection techniques.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.36 no.5_1
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• pp.749-762
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• 2020

Precipitation is closely related to various hydrometeorological phenomena, such as runoff and evapotranspiration. In Korean Peninsula, observing rainfall intensity using weather radar and rain gauge network is dominating due to their accurate, intuitive and precise detecting power. However,since these methods are not suitable at ungauged regions, rainfall detection using satellite is required. Satellite-based rainfall data has coarse spatial resolution (10 km, 25 km), and has a limited range of usage due to its reliability of data. The aim of this study is to obtain finer scale precipitation. Especially, to make the applicability of satellite higher at ungauged regions, 10 km satellite-based rainfall data was downscaled to 1 km data using MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) based cloud property. Downscaled precipitation was verified in urban region, which has complex topographical and environmental characteristics. Correlation coefficient was similar in summer (+0), decreased in spring (-0.08) and autumn (-0.01), and increased in winter (+0.04) season compared to Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) based precipitation. Downscaling without calibration using in situ data could be useful in areas where rain gauge system is not sufficient or ground observations are rarely available.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.37 no.5_3
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• pp.1373-1387
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• 2021

Forest fire poses a significant threat to the environment and society, affecting carbon cycle and surface energy balance, and resulting in socioeconomic losses. Widely used multi-spectral satellite image-based approaches for burned area detection have a problem in that they do not work under cloudy conditions. Therefore, in this study, Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data from Europe Space Agency, which can be collected in all weather conditions, were used to identify forest fire damaged area based on a series of processes including Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and K-means clustering. Four forest fire cases, which occurred in Gangneung·Donghae and Goseong·Sokcho in Gangwon-do of South Korea and two areas in North Korea on April 4, 2019, were examined. The estimated burned areas were evaluated using fire reference data provided by the National Institute of Forest Science (NIFOS) for two forest fire cases in South Korea, and differenced normalized burn ratio (dNBR) for all four cases. The average accuracy using the NIFOS reference data was 86% for the Gangneung·Donghae and Goseong·Sokcho fires. Evaluation using dNBR showed an average accuracy of 84% for all four forest fire cases. It was also confirmed that the stronger the burned intensity, the higher detection the accuracy, and vice versa. Given the advantage of SAR remote sensing, the proposed statistical processing and K-means clustering-based approach can be used to quickly identify forest fire damaged area across the Korean Peninsula, where a cloud cover rate is high and small-scale forest fires frequently occur.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.5_1
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• pp.497-510
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• 2022

Agricultural reservoirs are essential structures for water supplies during dry period in the Korean peninsula, where water resources are temporally unequally distributed. For efficient water management, systematic and effective monitoring of medium-small reservoirs is required. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) provides a way for continuous monitoring of those, with its capability of all-weather observation. This study aims to evaluate the applicability of SAR in monitoring medium-small reservoirs using Sentinel-1 (10 m resolution) and Capella X-SAR (1 m resolution), at Chari (CR), Galjeon (GJ), Dwitgol (DG) reservoirs located in Ulsan, Korea. Water detected results applying Z fuzzy function-based threshold (Z-thresh) and Chan-vese (CV), an object detection-based segmentation algorithm, are quantitatively evaluated using UAV-detected water boundary (UWB). Accuracy metrics from Z-thresh were 0.87, 0.89, 0.77 (at CR, GJ, DG, respectively) using Sentinel-1 and 0.78, 0.72, 0.81 using Capella, and improvements were observed when CV was applied (Sentinel-1: 0.94, 0.89, 0.84, Capella: 0.92, 0.89, 0.93). Boundaries of the waterbody detected from Capella agreed relatively well with UWB; however, false- and un-detections occurred from speckle noises, due to its high resolution. When masked with optical sensor-based supplementary images, improvements up to 13% were observed. More effective water resource management is expected to be possible with continuous monitoring of available water quantity, when more accurate and precise SAR-based water detection technique is developed.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.47 no.4
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• pp.371-384
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• 2014

This study developed a new algorithm of extreme rainfall extraction based on the Communication, Ocean and Meteorological Satellite (COMS) and the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM) Satellite image data and evaluated its applicability for the heavy rainfall event in July-2011 in Seoul, South Korea. The power-series-regression-based Z-R relationship was employed for taking into account for empirical relationships between TRMM/PR, TRMM/VIRS, COMS, and Automatic Weather System(AWS) at each elevation. The estimated Z-R relationship ($Z=303R^{0.72}$) agreed well with observation from AWS (correlation coefficient=0.57). The estimated 10-minute rainfall intensities from the COMS satellite using the Z-R relationship generated underestimated rainfall intensities. For a small rainfall event the Z-R relationship tended to overestimated rainfall intensities. However, the overall patterns of estimated rainfall were very comparable with the observed data. The correlation coefficients and the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 10-minute rainfall series from COMS and AWS gave 0.517, and 3.146, respectively. In addition, the averaged error value of the spatial correlation matrix ranged from -0.530 to -0.228, indicating negative correlation. To reduce the error by extreme rainfall estimation using satellite datasets it is required to take into more extreme factors and improve the algorithm through further study. This study showed the potential utility of multi-geostationary satellite data for building up sub-daily rainfall and establishing the real-time flood alert system in ungauged watersheds.