• Atmosphere
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.345-358
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• 2017

The decadal change in rainfall for Changma period over the South Korea in early-2000s is detected in this study. The Changma rainfall in P1 (1992~2002) decade is remarkably less than in P2 (2003~2013) decade. The much rainfall in P2 decade is associated with the increase of rainy day frequency during Changma period, including the frequent occurrences of rainy day with a intensity of 30 mm/day or more in P2 decade. This decadal change in the Changma rainfall is due to the decadal change of atmospheric circulation around the Korean Peninsula which affects the intensity and location of Changma rainfall. During P2 decade, the anomalous anti-cyclone over the south of the Korean Peninsula, which represents the expansion of the North Pacific high with warm and wet air mass toward East Asia, is stronger than in P1 decade. In addition, the upper level zonal wind and meridional gradient of low-level equivalent potential temperature in P2 decade is relatively strengthened over the northern part of the Korean Peninsula than in P1 decade, which corresponds with the intensification of meridional gradient between air mass related to the East Asian summer monsoon nearby the Korean Peninsula in P2 decade. The enhanced meridional gradient of atir mass during P2 decade is favorable condition for the intensification of Changma rainfall band and more Changma rainfall. The atmospheric conditions related to enhanced Changma rainfall during P2 decade is likely to be influenced by the teleconnection linked to the suppressed convection anomaly over the southern part of China and South China Sea in P2 decade.

• Journal of Korean Society on Water Environment
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.212-219
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• 2014

In this study, a land pollutant load calculation method in TMDLs was improved to consider climate change scenarios. In order to evaluate the new method, future change in rainfall patterns was predicted by using SRES A1B climate change scenarios and then post-processing methods such as change factor (CF) and quantile mapping (QM) were applied to correct the bias between the predicted and the observed rainfall patterns. Also, future land pollutant loads were estimated by using both the bias corrected rainfall patterns and the enhanced method. For the results of bias correction, both methods (CF and QM) predicted the temporal trend of the past rainfall patterns and QM method showed future daily average precipitation in the range of 1.1~7.5 mm and CF showed it in the range of 1.3~6.8 mm from 2014 to 2100. Also, in the result of the estimation of future land pollutant loads using the enhanced method (2020, 2040, 2100), TN loads were in the range of 4316.6~6138.6 kg/day and TP loads were in the range of 457.0~716.5 kg/day. However, each result of TN and TP loads in 2020, 2040, 2100 was the same with the original method. The enhanced method in this study will be useful to predict land pollutant loads under the influence of climate change because it can reflect future change in rainfall patterns. Also, it is expected that the results of this study are used as a base data of TMDLs in case of applying for climate change scenarios.

• Korean Journal of Soil Science and Fertilizer
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• v.44 no.6
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• pp.983-990
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• 2011

Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) has been used to estimate potential long-term soil erosion in the fields. However, the USLE does not estimate sediment yield due to lack of module considering sediment delivery ratio (SDR) for watershed application. For that reason, the Sediment Assessment Tool for Effective Erosion Control (SATEEC) system was developed and applied to compute the sediment yield at watershed scale. However, the R factor of current SATEEC Ver. 2.1 was estimated based on 5-day antecedent rainfall, it is not related with fundamental concept of R factor. To compute R factor accurately, the energy of rainfall strikes should be considered. In this study, the R module in the SATEEC system was enhanced using formulas of Williams, Foster, Cooley, CREAMS which could consider the energy of rainfall strikes. The enhanced SATEEC system ver. 2.2 was applied to the Imha watershed and monthly sediment yield was estimated. As a result of this study, the $R^2$ and NSE values are 0.591 and 0.573 for calibration period, and 0.927 and 0.911 for validation period, respectively. The results demonstrate the enhanced SATEEC System estimates the sediment yield suitably, and it could be used to establish the detailed environmental policy standard using USLE input dataset at watershed scale.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.46 no.3
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• pp.277-290
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• 2011

Changes of the characteristics in summer rainfall in the Republic of Korea by the regime shift and their causes were examined by analyzing long-term observational data. There has been an abrupt increase in rainfall variability since 1998, which was mainly due to the enhanced rainfall during August~September, although the gradual increase was also detected in June~July. In June~July, the enhanced rainfall developed as a band type covering the whole East Asia while in August~September, it is only found over the Republic of Korea with the greatest increase of 130 mm over Seoul and Gyeonggi area. The two intensified anticyclonic anomalies over the north-northwest/east of the Republic of Korea resulted in producing northerlies/southeasterlies, transporting cold/warm-wet air flows, respectively. The center of the convergence zone from the two separate systems located in the Republic of Korea, leading to a favorable condition for the development of the extreme rainfall. The enhanced barotropic anticyclonic anomalies also affected in warming the sea surface temperature anomalies covering from the eastern coast of East Asia to North Pacific Ocean, which in turn leaded to enhance warm air transporting back to the Republic of Korea.

• Atmosphere
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.141-158
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• 2016

The objective of this study is to examine the impact of urban canopy and the horizontal resolution on simulated meteorological variables such as 10-m wind speed, 2-m temperature and precipitation using WRF model for a local, convective rainfall case. We performed four sensitivity tests by varying the use of urban canopy model (UCM) and the horizontal resolution, then compared the model results with observations of AWS network. The focus of our study is over the Seoul metropolitan area for a convective rainfall that occurred on 16 August 16 2015. The analysis shows that mean diurnal variation of temperature is better simulated by the model runs with UCM before the convective rainfall. However, after rainfall, model shows significant difference in air temperature among sensitivity tests depending on the simulated rainfall amount. The rainfall amount is significantly underestimated in 0.5 km resolution model run compared to 1.5 km resolution, particularly over the urban areas. This is due to earlier occurrence of light rainfall in 0.5 km resolution model. Earlier light rainfall in the afternoon eliminates convective instability significantly, which prevents occurrence of rainfall later in the evening. The use of UCM results in a higher maximum rainfall in the domain, which is due to higher temperature in model runs with urban canopy. Earlier occurrence of rainfall in 0.5 km resolution model is related to rapid growth of PBL. Enhanced mixing and higher temperature result in rapid growth of PBL, which provides more favorable conditions for convection in the 0.5 km resolution run with urban canopy. All sensitivity tests show dry bias, which also contributes to the occurrence of light precipitation throughout the simulation period.

• Atmosphere
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.317-338
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• 2008

Analyses of observational data and numerical simulations were performed to understand the mechanism of MCSs (Mesoscale Convective Systems) occurred on 13-14 July 2004 over Jindo area of the Korean Peninsula. Observations indicated that synoptic environment was favorable for the occurrence of heavy rainfall. This heavy rainfall appeared to have been enhanced by convergence around the Changma front and synoptic scale lifting. From the analyses of storm environment using Haenam upper-air observation data, it was confirmed that strong convective instability was present around the Jindo area. Instability indices such as K-index, SSI-index showed favorable condition for strong convection. In addition, warm advection in the lower troposphere and cold advection in the middle troposphere were detected from wind profiler data. The size of storm, that produced heavy rainfall over Jindo area, was smaller than $50{\times}50km^2$ according to radar observation. The storm developed more than 10 km in height, but high reflectivity (rain rate 30 mm/hr) was limited under 6 km. It can be judged that convection cells, which form cloud clusters, occurred on the inflow area of the Changma front. In numerical simulation, high CAPE (Convective Available Potential Energy) was found in the southwest of the Korean Peninsula. However, heavy rainfall was restricted to the Jindo area with high CIN (Convective INhibition) and high CAPE. From the observations of vertical drop size distribution from MRR (Micro Rain Radar) and the analyses of numerically simulated hydrometeors such as graupel etc., it can be inferred that melted graupels enhanced collision and coalescence process of heavy precipitation systems.

• Journal of Korean Society of Environmental Engineers
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• v.33 no.6
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• pp.439-446
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• 2011

In this research, enhanced land-cover classification methods using high-resolution satellite image (HRSI) and GIS in terms of practicality and accuracy was proposed. It aims for understanding non-point pollutant origin/loading, assessment the efficiency of rainfall storage/infiltration facilities and sounds water-environment management. The result of applying enhanced land-cover classification methods to the urban region verifies that roof and road area are including various vegetations such as roof garden, flower bed in the median strip and street tree. This accounts for 3% of total study area, and more importantly it was counted as impervious area by GIS alone or conventional indoor work. The feasibility of the method was assessed by applying to rainfall-runoff analysis for three weak rainfall in the range of 7.1-10.5 mm events in 2000, Chiba, Japan. A good agreement between simulated and observed runoff hydrograph was obtained. In comparison, the hydrograph simulated with land-use parameters by the detailed land-use information of 10m grid had an error between 31%~71%, while enhanced method showed 4% to 29%, and showed the improvement particularly for reproducing observed peak and recession flow rate of hydrograph in weak rainfall condition.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.36 no.5
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• pp.791-803
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• 2016

Recently, frequency of extreme rainfall events in South Korea has been substantially increased due to the enhanced climate variability. Korea is prone to flooding due to being surrounded by mountains, along with high rainfall intensity during a short period. In the past three decades, an increase in the frequency of heavy rainfall events has been observed due to enhanced climate variability and climate change. This study aimed to analyze extreme rainfalls informed by their frequency of occurrences using a long-term rainfall data. In this respect, we developed a Poisson-Generalized Pareto Distribution (Poisson-GPD) based rainfall frequency method which allows us to simultaneously explore changes in the amount and exceedance probability of the extreme rainfall events defined by different thresholds. Additionally, this study utilized a Bayesian approach to better estimate both parameters and their uncertainties. We also investigated the synoptic patterns associated with the extreme events considered in this study. The results showed that the Poisson-GPD based design rainfalls were rather larger than those of based on the Gumbel distribution. It seems that the Poisson-GPD model offers a more reasonable explanation in the context of flood safety issue, by explicitly considering the changes in the frequency. Also, this study confirmed that low and high pressure system in the East China Sea and the central North Pacific, respectively, plays crucial roles in the development of the extreme rainfall in South Korea.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.50 no.1
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• pp.17-28
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• 2017

A recent increase in extreme weather events and flash floods associated with the enhanced climate variability results in an increase in climate-related disasters. For these reasons, various studies based on a high resolution weather radar system have been carried out. The weather radar can provide estimates of precipitation in real-time over a wide area, while ground-based rain gauges only provides a point estimate in space. Weather radar is thus capable of identifying changes in rainfall structure as it moves through an ungauged basin. However, the advantage of the weather radar rainfall estimates has been limited by a variety of sources of uncertainty in the radar reflectivity process, including systematic and random errors. In this study, we developed an ensemble radar rainfall estimation scheme using the multivariate copula method. The results presented in this study confirmed that the proposed ensemble technique can effectively reproduce the rainfall statistics such as mean, variance and skewness (more importantly the extremes) as well as the spatio-temporal structure of rainfall fields.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.585-597
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• 2007

The characteristics of the rainfall events on the Korean peninsula have been investigated by means of regional and global observational data collected from 1954 to 2004 with an emphasis on extreme cases $80\;mm\;day^{-1}$. According to our analysis, long-term annual rainfall anomalies show an increasing trend. This trend is pronounced in the month of August, when both the amount of monthly rainfall and the frequency of extreme events increase significantly. Composite maps on August during the 8 wet years reveal warm SST anomalies over the eastern Philippine Sea which are associated with enhanced convection and vertical motion and intensified positive SLP over central Eurasia during August. The rainfall pattern suggests that the most significant increase in moisture supply over the southern parts of China and Korea in August is associated with positive SLP changes over Eurasia and negative SLP changes over the subtropical western Pacific off the east coast of south China. The frequent generation of typhoons over the warm eastern Philippine Sea and their tracks appear to influence the extreme rainfall events in Korea during the month of August. The typhoons in August mainly passed the western coast of Korea, resulting in the frequent occurrence of extreme rainfall events in this region. Furthermore, anomalous cyclonic circulations over the eastern Philippine Sea also promoted the generation of tropical cyclones. The position of pressure systems - positive SLP over Eurasia and negative SLP over the subtropical Pacific - in turn provided a pathway for typhoons. The moisture is then effectively transported further north toward Korea and east toward the southern parts of China during the extreme rainfall period.