• Journal of The Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers
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• v.59 no.4
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• pp.65-74
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• 2017

North Korea is one of the high vulnerable countries facing the threat of natural disaster and has experienced more frequent disasters in recent years. These disasters have significantly led to food shortages and large reductions in crop yields. In 2015, both North Korean officials and international agencies had identified the extreme drought event, the worst in one hundred years according to the North Korean government. The objective of this study was an assessment of the extreme drought events in 2014~2015, and to apply climatic drought indices for drought monitoring in North Korea. Characteristics of the extreme drought in North Korea are examined by using the weekly-based Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI). The drought characteristics illustrated by the SPEI results are compared with a Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) results and drought impact information to understand how these indices can explain the drought conditions within the country. These results demonstrated that the SPEI could be an effective tool to provide improved spatial and temporal drought conditions to inform management decisions for drought policy.

• Journal of The Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers
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• v.54 no.2
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• pp.67-75
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• 2012

Different from other natural hazards including floods, drought advances slowly and spreads widely, so that the preparedness is quite important and effective to mitigate the impacts from drought. Evaluation and forecast the status of drought for the present and future utilizing the meteorological scenario for agricultural drought can be useful to set a plan for agricultural drought mitigation in agriculture water resource management. In this study, drought climate scenario model on the basis of historical drought records for preparing agricultural drought mitigation was developed. To consider dependency and correlation between various climate variables, this model was utilized the historical climate pattern using reference year setting of four drought levels. The reference year for drought level was determined based on the frequency analysis result of monthly effective rainfall. On the basis of this model, drought climate scenarios at Suwon and Icheon station were set up and these scenarios were applied on the water balance simulation of reservoir water storage for Madun reservoir as well as the soil moisture model for Gosam reservoir watershed. The results showed that drought climate scenarios in this study could be more useful for long-term forecast of longer than 2~3 months period rather than short-term forecast of below one month.

• Journal of Ecology and Environment
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• v.35 no.4
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• pp.323-329
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• 2012

The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) is a widely used drought index to provide good estimations of the intensity, magnitude and spatial extent of droughts. The objective of this study was to analyze the spatial pattern of drought by SPI index. In this paper, the patterns of drought hazard in Iran are evaluated according to the data of 40 weather stations during 1967-2009. The influenced zone of each station was specified by the Thiessen method. It was attempted to make a new model of drought hazard using GIS. Three criteria for drought were studied and considered to define areas of vulnerability. Drought hazard criteria used in the present model included: maximum severity of drought in the period, trend of drought, and the maximum number of sequential arid years. Each of the vulnerability indicators were mapped and these as well as a final hazard map were classified into 5 hazard classes of drought: one, slight, moderate, severe and very severe. The final drought vulnerability map was prepared by overlaying three criteria maps in a GIS, and the final hazard classes were defined on the basis of hazard scores, which were determined according to the means of the main indicators. The final vulnerability map shows that severe hazard areas (43% of the country) which are observed in the west and eastern parts of country are much more widespread than areas under other hazard classes. Overall, approximately half of the country was determined to be under severe and very severe hazard classes for drought.

• Journal of The Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers
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• v.65 no.5
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• pp.13-24
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• 2023

Due to recent climate change, the amount of rainfall during the summer season in South Korea has been decreasing, leading to an increase in areas affected by frequent droughts. Droughts have the characteristic of occurring over a wide area and being unpredictable in terms of their onset and end, necessitating proactive research to cope with them. In this study, we conducted an assessment of agricultural drought vulnerability in Taean-gun, Chungcheongnam-do, focusing on irrigation facilities and paddy fields. The assessment criteria were meteorological impact, drought occurrence status, supplementary water supply capacity, and drought response capability, with nine specific indicators selected. The drought response capability was analyzed by applying a scoring system as a key component of the agricultural drought vulnerability assessment, while the other indicators were quantified using an entropy weighting technique. The results of the assessment showed that Anmyeon-eup and Taean-eup were the safest areas, while Wonbuk-myeon, Nam-myeon, and Gonam-myeon were the most vulnerable. It is expected that the findings can be utilized to enhance understanding and proactive measures for coping with agricultural drought, and to determine the priority of drought response in different regions.

• Journal of The Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers
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• v.63 no.5
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• pp.1-11
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• 2021

Soil moisture plays a critical role in hydrological processes, land-atmosphere interactions and climate variability. It can limit vegetation growth as well as infiltration of rainfall and therefore very important for agriculture sector and food protection. Recently, due to the increased damage from drought caused by climate change, there is a frequent occurrence of shortage of agricultural water, making it difficult to supply and manage stable agricultural water. Efficient water management is necessary to reduce drought damage, and soil moisture management is important in case of upland crops. In this study, soil moisture was calculated based on the water balance model, and the suitability of soil moisture data was verified through the application. The regional soil moisture was calculated based on the meteorological data collected by the meteorological station, and applied the Runs theory. We analyzed the spatiotemporal variability of soil moisture and drought impacts, and analyzed the correlation between actual drought impacts and drought damage through correlation analysis of Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI). The soil moisture steadily decreased and increased until the rainy season, while the drought size steadily increased and decreased until the rainy season. The regional magnitude of the drought was large in Gyeonggi-do and Gyeongsang-do, and in winter, severe drought occurred in areas of Gangwon-do. As a result of comparative analysis with actual drought events, it was confirmed that there is a high correlation with SPI by each time scale drought events with a correlation coefficient.

• Journal of The Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers
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• v.50 no.3
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• pp.3-15
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• 2008

North Korea is one of the vulnerable countries facing the threat of a drought, so that it is unavoidable to experience fatal damage when drought is occurred, and it is necessary to improve the drought response capability of water resources systems. However, it is still difficult to find research efforts for drought characteristics and drought management in North Korea. This study is to quantify drought duration and magnitude and to analyze drought characteristics in North Korea. In order to quantitatively identify historical drought conditions and to evaluate their variability, drought indices are commonly used. In this study, drought indices including dry-day index, deciles of normal precipitation, Phillips drought index, standardized precipitation index and Palmer drought severity index are calculated and compared monthly using the weather data for the twenty one meteorological stations in North Korea. The indices compared with the drought damage records that have reported from 1990 to present to understand how the indices can explain the drought. A comparative study was also conducted to evaluate the relative severity of the significant droughts occurred during 2000 and 2001 which were reported as the worst drought in North Korea. Drought indices calculated from this study demonstrated that those can be the effective tools in quantitatively evaluating drought severity and measures of drought. Thus it is recommended the distributed trend of drought be considered when the plan or measures for drought in North Korea are established.

• Magazine of the Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers
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• v.56 no.2
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• pp.2-15
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• 2014

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.32 no.3B
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• pp.161-168
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• 2012

Drought is a normal and recurrent phenomenon. But, recurring prolonged droughts have caused consequences and diverse impacts on human system. Therefore, understanding drought characteristics is indispensable element in well-prepared drought management. This study aims to investigate the hydrological droughts of Pyongchang stream and Upstream of Namhan-river in Korean peninsula. For modelling of the joint distribution of drought duration and drought severity, the copula method is used to construct the bivariate drought distribution and return period from the predetermined marginal distributions of drought duration and drought severity. As the result, the most severed drought of the Pyongchang stream and Upstream of Namhan-river occuring during period 1967 to 2007 is the 1981 and 1973. Return period for this drought derived from copula is 550 and 110 years.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2019.05a
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• pp.150-150
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• 2019

The development of prolong and severe drought can directly impact on the environment, agriculture, economics and society of country. A lot of efforts have been made across worldwide in the planning, monitoring and mitigation of drought. Currently, different drought indices such as the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) are developed and most commonly used to monitor drought characteristics quantitatively. However, it will be very meaningful and essential to develop a more effective technique for assessment and monitoring of onset and end of drought. Therefore, in this study, the hidden Markov Bayesian classifier (MBC) was employed for the assessment of onset and end of meteorological drought classes. The results showed that the probabilities of different classes based on the MBC were quite suitable and can be employed to estimate onset and end of each class for meteorological droughts. The classification results of MBC were compared with SPI and with past studies which proved that the MBC was able to account accuracy in determining the accurate drought classes. For more performance evaluation of classification results confusion matrix was used to find accuracy and precision in predicting the classes and their results are also appropriate. The overall results indicate that the MBC was effective in predicating the onset and end of drought events and can utilized for monitoring and management of short-term drought risk.

• Journal of The Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers
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• v.57 no.4
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• pp.1-9
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• 2015

The development of drought index that provides detailed-spatial-resolution drought information is essential for improving drought planning and preparedness. The objective of this study was to develop the concept of using satellite-based hybrid drought index called the Vegetation Drought Response Index in South Korea (VegDRI-SKorea) that could improve spatial resolution for monitoring local and regional drought. The VegDRI-SKorea was developed using the Classification And Regression Trees (CART) algorithm based on remote sensing data such as Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) from MODIS satellite images, climate drought indices such as Self Calibrating Palmer Drought Severity Index (SC-PDSI) and Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), and the biophysical data such as land cover, eco region, and soil available water capacity. A case study has been done for the 2012 drought to evaluate the VegDRI-SKorea model for South Korea. The VegDRI-SKorea represented the drought areas from the end of May and to the severe drought at the end of June. Results show that the integration of satellite imageries and various associated data allows us to get improved both spatially and temporally drought information using a data mining technique and get better understanding of drought condition. In addition, VegDRI-SKorea is expected to contribute to monitor the current drought condition for evaluating local and regional drought risk assessment and assisting drought-related decision making.