Abstract
The objectives of this study are to develop a real-time drought monitoring and prediction system on the East Asia domain and to evaluate the performance of the system by using past historical drought records. The system is mainly composed of two parts: drought monitoring for providing current drought indices with meteorological and hydrological conditions; drought outlooks for suggesting future drought indices and future hydrometeorological conditions. Both parts represent the drought conditions on the East Asia domain (latitude $21.15{\sim}50.15^{\circ}$, longitude $104.40{\sim}149.65^{\circ}$), Korea domain (latitude $30.40{\sim}43.15^{\circ}$, longitude $118.65{\sim}135.65^{\circ}$) and South Korea domain (latitude $30.40{\sim}43.15^{\circ}$, longitude $118.65{\sim}135.65^{\circ}$), respectively. The observed meteorological data from ASOS (Automated Surface Observing System) and AWS (Automatic Weather System) of KMA (Korean Meteorological Administration) and model-driven hydrological data from LSM (Land Surface model) are used for the real-time drought monitoring, while the monthly and seasonal weather forecast information from UM (Unified Model) of KMA are utilized for drought outlooks. For the evaluation of the system, past historical drought records occurred in Korea are surveyed and are compared with the application results of the system. The results demonstrated that the selected drought indices such as KMA drought index, SPI (3), SPI (6), PDSI, SRI and SSI are reasonable, especially, the performance of SRI and SSI provides higher accuracy that the others.
