• Korean Journal of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.1-16
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• 2007

The use of information on natural resources is indispensable to most agricultural activities to avoid disasters, to improve input efficiency, and to increase lam income. Most information is prepared and managed at a spatial scale called the "Hydrologic Unit" (HU), which means watershed or small river basin, because virtually every environmental problem can be handled best within a single HU. South Korea consists of 840 such watersheds and, while other watershed-specific information is routinely managed by government organizations, there are none responsible for agricultural weather and climate. A joint research team of Kyung Hee University and the Agriculture, forestry and Fisheries Information Service has begun a 4-year project funded by the Ministry of Agriculture and forestry to establish a watershed-specific agricultural weather information service based on "high definition" digital climate maps (HD-DCMs) utilizing the state of the art geospatial climatological technology. For example, a daily minimum temperature model simulating the thermodynamic nature of cold air with the aid of raster GIS and microwave temperature profiling will quantify effects of cold air drainage on local temperature. By using these techniques and 30-year (1971-2000) synoptic observations, gridded climate data including temperature, solar irradiance, and precipitation will be prepared for each watershed at a 30m spacing. Together with the climatological normals, there will be 3-hourly near-real time meterological mapping using the Korea Meteorological Administration's digital forecasting products which are prepared at a 5 km by 5 km resolution. Resulting HD-DCM database and operational technology will be transferred to local governments, and they will be responsible for routine operations and applications in their region. This paper describes the project in detail and demonstrates some of the interim results.