DOI QR코드

DOI QR Code

Are Spring and Fall in South Korea Getting Shorter?

한국의 봄-가을은 짧아지고 있는가?

  • Kim, Dong Hyun (Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, KAIST) ;
  • Shin, Hayong (Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, KAIST)
  • 김동현 (KAIST 산업 및 시스템 공학과) ;
  • 신하용 (KAIST 산업 및 시스템 공학과)
  • Received : 2013.05.04
  • Accepted : 2013.06.24
  • Published : 2013.12.15

Abstract

A clear increase in the average annual temperature is observed worldwide, and climate changes take place in response to that increase. This affects not only the ecosystem, but also to mankind. Of all those aspects of climate change, people are especially interested in the length of each season, and people acknowledge that the duration of spring and fall has been shortened over the past several years. Still, it is difficult to observe this kind of phenomenon with the simple analysis of dividing the seasons and calculating the duration. Therefore, this study attempted to set up a more intuitive standard which well reflects the current situation. This study also divided the daily climate into 4 states using the daily maximum and minimum temperature. Moreover, using the Hidden Markov Model, this study calculated the duration of each season and analyzed its tendency based on the daily temperature data of the last 53 years (1960~2012). According to the result, the duration of spring and fall showed mild decreasing tendency over the past 53 years, and the duration of fall decreased even more during the past 30 years in the Korean peninsula. After 1960, the start of spring was advanced, which decreased the length of winter for about 11 days. On the other hand, the duration of summer increased for about 25 days, which is consistent with the worldwide tendency of temperature increase.

Keywords

References

  1. Yoo, J. H. and Kang, I. S. (2002), Temperature variation related to seasonal transition and secular trend of season in Korea, Daegi, 12(1), 107-110.
  2. Lee, B. S. (1979), A Study of Natural Seasons in Korea, Journal of the Korean Geographical Society, 14(2), 1-11.
  3. Choi, G. Y., Kwon, W. T., and Robinson, David A. (2006), Seasonal Onset and Duration in South Korea, Journal of the Korean Geographical Society, 41(4), 435-456.
  4. Lawrence, R. Rabiner (1989), A tutorial on hidden Markov models and selected applications in speech recognition, Readings in Speech Recognition, 267-296.
  5. Lawrence, R. Rabiner, and Juang, B.-H. (1986), An introduction to hidden Markov models, IEEE ASSP Magazine, 3(1), 4-16. https://doi.org/10.1109/MASSP.1986.1165351