• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.706-723
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• 2010

The impervious surface was frequently employed as a proxy of the total environmental burden in the urban area. The impervious surface was extracted from a satellite image and the GIS (Geographical Information System) database for childhood asthma hospitalizations was generated for a total of 62,136 children using the National Health Insurance database of South Korea. Children living in an impervious environment do result in almost twice as many hospitalizations (26.58%) for asthma, as compared to the sub-urban pervious living (15.82%). Furthermore, the risk zones with persistently high hospitalizations for three years were specifically identified over the impervious sub-district alone. The impervious zone showed a small inter-year variation of hospitalizations (r: 0.937) while the sub-urban pervious fringe was found to display a yearly variation(r: 0.371). The strong temporal autocorrelation means that the impervious areas have frequent long-lived hospitalizations for asthma, thus children living in impervious areas were likely to have had more chronic asthma attacks than those living in pervious areas. These experimental results indicate that an impervious surface as thematic parameter of analysis is a crucial explanatory variable for asthma hospitalizations and its longer persistence among children.