Inhomogeneities in Korean Climate Data (II): Due to the Change of the Computing Procedure of Daily Mean

기상청 기후자료의 균질성 문제 (II): 통계지침의 변경

The station relocations, the replacement of instruments, and the change of a procedure for calculating derived climatic quantities from observations are well-known nonclimatic factors that seriously contaminate the worthwhile results in climate study. Prior to embarking on the climatological analysis, therefore, the quality and homogeneity of the utilized data sets should be properly evaluated with metadata. According to the metadata of the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA), there have been plenty of changes in the procedure computing the daily mean values of temperature, humidity, etc, since 1904. For routine climatological work, it is customary to compute approximate daily mean values for individual days from values observed at fixed hours. In the KMA, fixed hours were totally 5 times changed: at four-hourly, four-hourly interval with additional 12 hour, eight-hourly, six-hourly, three-hourly intervals. In this paper, the homogeneity in the daily mean temperature dataset of the KMA was assessed with the consistency and efficiency of point estimators. We used the daily mean calculated from the 24 hourly readings as a potential true value. Approximate daily means computed from temperatures observed at different fixed hours have statistically different properties. So this inhomogeneity in KMA climate data should be kept in mind if you want to analysis secular aspects of Korea climate using this data set.