• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
• /
• v.33 no.4
• /
• pp.401-410
• /
• 2017

Estimation of snow depth using optical image is conducted by using correlation with Snow Cover Fraction (SCF). Various algorithms have been proposed for the estimation of snow cover fraction based on Normalized Difference Snow Index (NDSI). In this study we tested linear, quadratic, and exponential equations for the generation of snow cover fraction maps using data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Aqua satellite in order to evaluate their applicability to the complex terrain of South Korea and to search for improvements to the estimation of snow depth on this landscape. The results were validated by comparison with in-situ snowfall data from weather stations, with Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) calculated as 3.43, 2.37, and 3.99 cm for the linear, quadratic, and exponential approaches, respectively. Although quadratic results showed the best RMSE, this was due to the limitations of the data used in the study; there are few number of in-situ data recorded on the station at the time of image acquisition and even the data is mostly recorded on low snowfall. So, we conclude that linear-based algorithms are better suited for use in South Korea. However, in the case of using the linear equation, the SCF with a negative value can be calculated, so it should be corrected. Since the coefficients of the equation are not optimized for this area, further regression analysis is needed. In addition, if more variables such as Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), land cover, etc. are considered, it could be possible that estimation of national-scale snow depth with higher accuracy.

• Journal of The Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers
• /
• v.62 no.3
• /
• pp.51-61
• /
• 2020

Drought events are not clear when those start and end compared with other natural disasters. Because drought events have different timing and severity of damage depending on the region, various studies are being conducted using satellite images to identify regional drought occurrence differences. In this study, we investigated the applicability of drought assessment using the Evaporative Stress Index (ESI) based on Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite images. The ESI is an indicator of agricultural drought that describes anomalies in actual and reference evapotranspiration (ET) ratios that are retrieved using remotely sensed inputs of Land Surface Temperature (LST) and Leaf Area Index (LAI). However, these approaches have a limited spatial resolution when mapping detailed vegetation stress caused by drought, and drought hazard in the actual crop cultivation areas due to the small crop cultivation in South Korea. For these reasons, the development of a drought index that provides detailed higher resolution ESI, a 500 m resolution image is essential to improve the country's drought monitoring capabilities. The newly calculated ESI was verified through the existing 5 km resolution ESI and historical records for drought impacts. This study evaluates the performance of the recently developed 500 m resolution ESI for severe and extreme drought events that occurred in South Korea in 2001, 2009, 2014, and 2017. As a result, the two ES Is showed high correlation and tendency using Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) analysis. In addition, it will provide the necessary information on the spatial resolution to evaluate regional drought hazard assessment and and the small-scale cultivation area across South Korea.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
• /
• v.35 no.4
• /
• pp.573-587
• /
• 2019

A multi-temporal approach using remotely sensed time series data obtained over multiple years is a very useful method for monitoring land covers and land-cover changes. While spectral-based methods at any particular time limits the application utility due to instability of the quality of data obtained at that time, the approach based on the temporal profile can produce more accurate results since data is analyzed from a long-term perspective rather than on one point in time. In this study, a multi-temporal approach applying a multi-periodic harmonic model is proposed for classification of remotely sensed data. A harmonic model characterizes the seasonal variation of a time series by four parameters: average level, frequency, phase, and amplitude. The availability of high-quality data is very important for multi-temporal analysis.An satellite image usually have many unobserved data and bad-quality data due to the influence of observation environment and sensing system, which impede the analysis and might possibly produce inaccurate results. Harmonic analysis is also very useful for real-time data reconstruction. Multi-periodic harmonic model is applied to the reconstructed data to classify land covers and monitor land-cover change by tracking the temporal profiles. The proposed method is tested with the MODIS and GOCI NDVI time series over the Korean Peninsula for 5 years from 2012 to 2016. The results show that the multi-periodic harmonic model has a great potential for classification of land-cover types and monitoring of land-cover changes through characterizing annual temporal dynamics.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
• /
• v.29 no.5
• /
• pp.517-525
• /
• 2013

Time-series data of Normal Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) obtained by the Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer(MODIS) satellite imagery gives a waveform that reveals the characteristics of the phenology. The waveform can be decomposed into harmonics of various periods by the Fourier transformation. The resulting $n^{th}$ harmonics represent the amount of NDVI change in a period of a year divided by n. The values of each harmonics or their relative relation have been used to classify the vegetation species and to build a vegetation map. Here, we propose a method to estimate the annual amount of carbon absorbed on the forest from the $1^{st}$ harmonic NDVI value. The $1^{st}$ harmonic value represents the amount of growth of the leaves. By the allometric equation of trees, the growth of leaves can be considered to be proportional to the total amount of carbon absorption. We compared the $1^{st}$ harmonic NDVI values of the 6220 sample points with the reference data of the carbon absorption obtained by the field survey in the forest of South Korea. The $1^{st}$ harmonic values were roughly proportional to the amount of carbon absorption irrespective of the species and ages of the vegetation. The resulting proportionality constant between the carbon absorption and the $1^{st}$ harmonic value was 236 tCO2/5.29ha/year. The total amount of carbon dioxide absorption in the forest of South Korea over the last ten years has been estimated to be about 56 million ton, and this coincides with the previous reports obtained by other methods. Considering that the amount of the carbon absorption becomes a kind of currency like carbon credit, our method is very useful due to its generality.

• Journal of the Korean Association of Geographic Information Studies
• /
• v.21 no.1
• /
• pp.46-56
• /
• 2018

This paper aimed to identify main factors of community characters, which have an effect on the land surface temperature(LST) change and estimate the impacting coefficient(ratio) of factors in a significant level of statistics. Chungcheongbuk-do province was selected and then partitioned into city and county areas for the sake of convenience of modeling. LST time series data and the community character data were developed based on Terra Satellite MODIS data and collected from the National Statistical Office, respectively. By the cause and effect relationship between community characters and LST, regression coefficients were estimated using a penal model. In a panel modeling, LST and community characters were used as a dependent variable and explanatory variables, respectively. Panel modeling analysis was carried out using statistical package STATA14 and one-way fixed effect model was selected as the most suitable model to evaluate the regression coefficients in the study area. The impacting ratio of LST change by any explanatory variable derived from the regression coefficients of the panel model fixed. Impacting ratios for industrial areas, elevation ${\times}$ building, energy usage, average window speed, non-urban management area, agricultural, nature and environmental conservation, average precipitation were 3.746, 2.856, 2.742, 0.553, 0.102, 0.071 and 0.003, respectively.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
• /
• v.34 no.2_1
• /
• pp.267-282
• /
• 2018

Despite the continuous development of phenology detection studies using satellite imagery, verification through comparison with the field observed data is insufficient. Especially, in the case of Korean forests patching in various forms, it is difficult to estimate the start of season (SOS) by using only satellite images due to resolution difference. To improve the accuracy of vegetation phenology estimation, this study reconstructed the large scaled forest type map (1:5,000) with MODIS pixel resolution and produced time series vegetation phenology curves from Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) derived from MODIS images. Based on the field observed data, extraction methods for the vegetation indices and SOS for Korean forests were compared and evaluated. We also analyzed the correlation between the composition ratio of forest types in each pixel and phenology extraction from the vegetation indices. When we compared NDVI and EVI with the field observed SOS data from the Korea National Arboretum, EVI was more accurate for Korean forests, and the first derivative was most suitable for extracting SOS in the phenology curve from the vegetation index. When the eight pixels neighboring the pixels of 7 broadleaved trees with field SOS data (center pixel) were compared to field SOS, the forest types of the best pixels with the highest correlation with the field data were deciduous forest by 67.9%, coniferous forest by 14.3%, and mixed forest by 7.7%, and the mean coefficient of determination ($R^2$) was 0.64. The average national SOS extracted from MODIS EVI were DOY 112.9 in 2014 at the earliest and DOY 129.1 in 2010 at the latest, which is about 0.16 days faster since 2003. In future research, it is necessary to expand the analysis of deciduous and mixed forests' SOS into the extraction of coniferous forest's SOS in order to understand the various climate and geomorphic factors. As such, comprehensive study should be carried out considering the diversity of forest ecosystems in Korea.

• Journal of the Korean Association of Geographic Information Studies
• /
• v.17 no.3
• /
• pp.20-38
• /
• 2014

Vegetation phenology is the most important indicator of ecosystem response to climate change. Therefore it is necessary to continuously monitor forest phenology. This paper analyzes the phenological characteristics of forests in South Korea using the MODIS vegetation index with error from clouds or other sources removed using the HANTS algorithm. After using the HANTS algorithm to reduce the noise of the satellite-based vegetation index data, we were able to confirm that phenological transition dates varied strongly with altitudinal gradients. The dates of the start of the growing season, end of the growing season and the length of the growing season were estimated to vary by +0.71day/100m, -1.33day/100m and -2.04day/100m in needleleaf forests, +1.50day/100m, -1.54day/100m and -3.04day/100m in broadleaf forests, +1.39day/100m, -2.04day/100m and -3.43day/100m in mixed forests. We found a linear pattern of variation in response to altitudinal gradients that was related to air temperature. We also found that broadleaf forests are more sensitive to temperature changes compared to needleleaf forests.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
• /
• 2003.11a
• /
• pp.75-77
• /
• 2003

The spatial distribution of snow cover area is a crucial input to models of hydrology and climate in alpine and other seasonally snow covered areas.The objective in our study is to develop a rapidly automatic and high accuracy snow cover mapping algorithm applicable for the Tibetan Plateau which is the most sensitive about climatic change. Monitoring regional snow extent reqires higher temoral frequency-moderate spatial resolution imagery.Our algorithm is based AVHRR and MODIS data and will provide long-term fraction snow cover area map.We present here a technique is based on the multiple endmembers approach and by taking advantages of current approaches, we developed a technique for automatic selection of local reference spectral endmembers.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
• /
• v.36 no.5_4
• /
• pp.1179-1194
• /
• 2020

This study investigates the feasibility of three algorithms, K-Nearest Neighbors (K-NN), Random Forest (RF) and Neural Network (NN), for estimating the air temperature of an unobserved area where the weather station is not installed. The satellite image were obtained from Landsat-8 and MODIS Aqua/Terra acquired in 2019, and the meteorological ground weather data were from AWS/ASOS data of Korea Meteorological Administration and Korea Forest Service. In addition, in order to improve the estimation accuracy, a digital surface model, solar radiation, aspect and slope were used. The accuracy assessment of machine learning methods was performed by calculating the statistics of R² (determination coefficient) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) through 10-fold cross-validation and the estimated values were compared for each target area. As a result, the neural network algorithm showed the most stable result among the three algorithms with R² = 0.805 and RMSE = 0.508. The neural network algorithm was applied to each data set on Landsat imagery scene. It was possible to generate an mean air temperature map from June to September 2019 and confirmed that detailed air temperature information could be estimated. The result is expected to be utilized for national disaster safety management such as heat wave response policies and heat island mitigation research.

• Asian Journal of Atmospheric Environment
• /
• v.7 no.1
• /
• pp.25-37
• /
• 2013

Open biomass burning (excluding biofuels) is an important contributor to air pollution in the Asian region. Estimation of emissions from fires, however, has been problematic, primarily because of uncertainty in the size and location of sources and in their temporal and spatial variability. Hence, more comprehensive tools to estimate wildfire emissions and that can characterize their temporal and spatial variability are needed. Furthermore, an emission processing system that can generate speciated, gridded, and temporally allocated emissions is needed to support air-quality modeling studies over Asia. For these reasons, a biomass-burning emissions modeling system based on satellite imagery was developed to better account for the spatial and temporal distributions of emissions. The BlueSky Framework, which was developed by the USDA Forest Service and US EPA, was used to develop the Asian biomass-burning emissions modeling system. The sub-models used for this study were the Fuel Characteristic Classification System (FCCS), CONSUME, and the Emissions Production Model (EPM). Our domain covers not only Asia but also Siberia and part of central Asia to assess the large boreal fires in the region. The MODIS fire products and vegetation map were used in this study. Using the developed modeling system, biomass-burning emissions were estimated during April and July 2008, and the results were compared with previous studies. Our results show good to fair agreement with those of GFEDv3 for most regions, ranging from 9.7 % in East Asia to 52% in Siberia. The SMOKE modeling system was combined with this system to generate three-dimensional model-ready emissions employing the fire-plume rise algorithm. This study suggests a practicable and maintainable methodology for supporting Asian air-quality modeling studies and to help understand the impact of air-pollutant emissions on Asian air quality.