• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.55 no.9
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• pp.679-686
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• 2022

As the occurrences of flash floods have increased due to climate change, faster and more accurate precipitation observation using X-band radar has become important. Therefore, the Ministry of Environment installed two dual-pol X-band radars at Samcheok and Uljin. The radar data used in this study were obtained from two different elevation angles and composed to reduce the shielding effect. To obtain quantitative rainfall, quality control (QC), K_DP retrieval, and Hybrid Surface Rainfall (HSR) methods were sequentially applied. To improve the accuracy of the quantitative precipitation estimation (QPE) of the X-band radar, we retrieved parameters for the relationship between rainfall rate and specific differential phase, which is commonly called the R-K_DP relationship; hence, an empirical approach was developed using multiple rain gauges for those two radars. The newly suggested relationship, R = 27.4K^0.81_DP, slightly increased the correlation coefficient by 1% more than the relationship suggested by the previous study. The root mean square error significantly decreased from 3.88 mm/hr to 3.68 mm/hr, and the bias of the estimated precipitation also decreased from -1.72 mm/hr to -0.92 mm/hr for overall cases, showing the improvement of the new method.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.36 no.1
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• pp.109-124
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• 2015

A novel approach, hybrid surface rainfall (KNU-HSR) technique developed by Kyungpook Natinal University, was utilized for improving the radar rainfall estimation. The KNU-HSR technique estimates radar rainfall at a 2D hybrid surface consistings of the lowest radar bins that is immune to ground clutter contaminations and significant beam blockage. Two HSR techniques, static and dynamic HSRs, were compared and evaluated in this study. Static HSR technique utilizes beam blockage map and ground clutter map to yield the hybrid surface whereas dynamic HSR technique additionally applies quality index map that are derived from the fuzzy logic algorithm for a quality control in real time. The performances of two HSRs were evaluated by correlation coefficient (CORR), total ratio (RATIO), mean bias (BIAS), normalized standard deviation (NSD), and mean relative error (MRE) for ten rain cases. Dynamic HSR (CORR=0.88, BIAS= $-0.24mm\;hr^{-1}$, NSD=0.41, MRE=37.6%) shows better performances than static HSR without correction of reflectivity calibration bias (CORR=0.87, BIAS= $-2.94mm\;hr^{-1}$, NSD=0.76, MRE=58.4%) for all skill scores. Dynamic HSR technique overestimates surface rainfall at near range whereas it underestimates rainfall at far ranges due to the effects of beam broadening and increasing the radar beam height. In terms of NSD and MRE, dynamic HSR shows the best results regardless of the distance from radar. Static HSR significantly overestimates a surface rainfall at weaker rainfall intensity. However, RATIO of dynamic HSR remains almost 1.0 for all ranges of rainfall intensity. After correcting system bias of reflectivity, NSD and MRE of dynamic HSR are improved by about 20 and 15%, respectively.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.54 no.11
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• pp.903-913
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• 2021

In the flood season, the measurement of the river discharge has many restrictions due to reasons such as budget, manpower, safety, convenience in measurement and so on. In particular, when heavy rain events occur due to typhoons, etc., it is difficult to measure the amount of flood due to the above problems. In order to improve this problem, in this study, a method was developed that can measure the river discharge in a flood season simply and safely in a short time with minimal manpower by combining the functions of a drone and a surface velocity doppler radar. To overcome the mechanical limitations of drones caused by weather issues such as wind and rainfall derived from the measurement of the river discharge using the conventional drone, we developed a drone with P56 grade dustproof and waterproof performance, stable flight capability at a wind speed of up to 36 km/h, and a payload weight of up to 10 kg. Further, to eliminate vibration which is the most important constraint factor in the measurement with a surface velocity doppler radar, a damper plate was developed as a device that combines a drone and a surface velocity Doppler radar. The velocity meter DSVM (Dron and Surface Veloctity Meter using doppler radar) that combines the flight equipment with the velocity meter was produced. The error of ±3.5% occurred as a result of measuring the river discharge using DSVM at the point of Geumsan-gun (Hwangpunggyo) located at Bonghwang stream (the first tributary stream of the Geum River). In addition, when calculating the mean velocity from the measured surface velocity, the measurement was performed using ADCP simultaneously to improve accuracy, and the mean velocity conversion factor (0.92) was calculated by comparing the mean velocity. In this study, the discharge measured by combining a drone and a surface velocity meter was compared with the discharge measured using ADCP and floats, so that the application and utility of DSVM was confirmed.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.13 no.9
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• pp.1753-1759
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• 2009

A weather radar as one of the remote sensing devices to analyze the weather phenomena receives the return echoes which consist of scattered electromagnetic wave signals from rain, cloud and dust particles, etc. These received Doppler weather spectra are analyzed to extract the various characteristic weather information. The mean wind velocity is one of the important weather parameters which can be obtained by a weather radar ed it may be useful in the prevention of weather hazards occurred by the abrupt shift of wind in small geographical scales such as microbursts. It is usually estimated by pulse pair method which is considered to be reliable and very efficient in the computational requirement. However, there are some problems in the accurate estimation of the mean velocity if Doppler spectra of weather signals appear to be asymmetric gaussian or multi-peak spectra. Therefore, in this paper, the problems in the mean estimation of asymmetric Doppler spectra are analyzed and the improved method is suggested.

• Journal of Satellite, Information and Communications
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.62-66
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• 2017

In this paper, we present the development of communication and data processing strategy for the electromagnetic wave precipitation gauge system. The electromagnetic wave precipitation gauge system is a small system for deriving area rainfall rates within 1 km radius through dual polarization radar observation at 24GHz band. It is necessary to take consider for measurement of accurate precipitation under limited computing resources originating from small systems and to minimize the use of network for the unattended operation and remote management. To overcome computational resource limitations, we adopted the fuzzy logic for quality control to eliminate non-precipitation echoes and developed the method by weighted synthesis of various rain rate fields using multiple radar QPE formulas. Also we have designed variable data packets rules to minimize the network traffic.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2011.05a
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• pp.94-94
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• 2011

최근에 산악지역에서의 국지성 강우에 의한 사고 발생이 증가하고 있고, 2009년에는 북한의 무단 댐방류로 인해 인명피해가 발생함에 따라서 산악이나 북한 지역과 같은 지역의 모니터링이 필요하게 되었으며, 강수량의 기후학적 분포의 특성과 같은 장기적인 강수량 정보가 필요하게 되었다. 레이더는 넓은 영역에 대해서 시 공간적으로 고해상도의 자료를 제공할 수 있기 때문에 국지 규모의 단시간 강수량 정보를 제공하는데 유용하다. 국립기상연구소(National Institute of Meteorological Research; NIMR)는 기존의 층운형 Z-R 관계식(Z=$200R^{1.6}$, Marshall-Palmer, 1948)을 이용한 레이더 강우강도 산출에서 과소추정 문제를 개선하기 위해 레이더-AWS 강우강도(Radar-AWS Rain rate; RAR) 산출 시스템을 개발하여 현재 운영하고 있다. RAR 산출 알고리즘은 각 레이더에 대해서 레이더 강우강도와 지상 AWS 우량계 자료를 비교하여 실시간으로 Z-R 관계식을 산출하여, 레이더 반사도를 강우강도로 변환하고, 이를 합성하여 한반도 영역에 대해서 강우강도 정보를 제공한다. 2010년에는 RAR 자료와 지상 AWS 우량계 자료를 이용하여 레이더-AWS 누적강수량을 산출하는 시스템을 구축하였으며, 현재 시험운영 중에 있다. 본 연구에서는 레이더-AWS 누적강수량의 정확도를 평가하기 위해서 2009년에 대해 레이더-AWS 누적강수량 자료와 지상 AWS 누적강수량 자료에 대해 RMSE, Bias 등의 통계값을 산출하였으며, 북한 지역에 대한 적용가능성을 분석하기 위해서 레이더 관측 반경 내의 북한 지역의 GTS 지점 자료를 이용하여 사례 분석하였다. 본 연구는 레이더 자료를 이용한 지상 관측 공백지역의 강수량에 대한 모니터링을 통하여 이러한 지역의 사고에 대비할 수 있고, 기후학적인 강수량 정보 제공 및 향후 유역별 레이더 면적강수지도 시험판 개발을 통하여 수문 기상 분야에 적용하여 효과적인 물관리에 기여할 수 있을 것으로 사료된다.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.12 no.10
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• pp.1737-1743
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• 2008

A weather radar extracts the weather information from the return echoes which consist of scattered electromagnetic wave signals from rain, cloud and dust particles, etc. The characteristics of Doppler weather signal and ground clutter should be analyzed to extract the accurate weather information. However, the conventional symmetric weather Doppler model is somewhat inappropriate in representing various weather situations. Therefore, the improved model is suggested to describe the skewness in the Doppler spectrum model. Using the suggested model, many various weather signals can be simulated efficiently in time and spectral domain according to weather situations, operation environment and system characteristics. This simulation method may be very helpful in verifying the accuracy of the weather information extraction algorithms and developing the new system for further performance improvement.

• Proceedings of the International Union of Geodesy And Geophysics Korea Journal of Geophysical Research Conference
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• 2003.05a
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• pp.14-14
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• 2003

SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) is an imaging radar which can scan and image Earth System targets without solar illumination. Most Earth observation Shh systems operate in X-, C-, S-, L-, and P-band frequencies, where the shortest wavelength is approximately 1.5 cm. This means that most opaque objects in the SAR signal path become transparent and SAR systems can image the planetary surface targets without sunlight and through rain, snow and/or even volcanic ash clouds. Most conventional SAR systems in operation, including the Canada's RADARSAT-1, operate in one frequency and in one polarization. This has resulted in black and with images, with which we are familiar now. However, with the launching of ENVTSAT on March 1 2002, the ASAR system onboard the ENVISAT can image Earth's surface targets with selected polarimetric signals, HH+VV, HH+VH, and VV+HV. In 2004, Canadian Space Agency will launch RADARSAT-II, which is C-band, fully polarimetric HH+VV+VH+HV. Almost same time, the NASDA of Japan will launch ALOS (Advanced land Observation Satellite) which will carry L-band PALSAR system, which is again fully polarimetric. This means that we will have at least three fully polarimetric space-borne SAR system fur civilian operation in less than one year. Are we then ready for this new all weather Earth Observation technology\ulcorner Actual imaging process of a fully polarimetric SAR system is not easy to explain. But, most Earth system scientists, including geologists, are familiar with polarization microscopes and other polarization effects in nature. The spatial resolution of the new generation of SAR systems have also been steadily increased, almost to the limit of highest optical resolution. In this talk some new applications how they are used for Earth system observation purpose.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.53 no.12
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• pp.1159-1172
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• 2020

This study applied deep convolution neural network based on U-Net and SegNet using long period weather radar data to very short-term rainfall prediction. And the results were compared and evaluated with the translation model. For training and validation of deep neural network, Mt. Gwanak and Mt. Gwangdeoksan radar data were collected from 2010 to 2016 and converted to a gray-scale image file in an HDF5 format with a 1km spatial resolution. The deep neural network model was trained to predict precipitation after 10 minutes by using the four consecutive radar image data, and the recursive method of repeating forecasts was applied to carry out lead time 60 minutes with the pretrained deep neural network model. To evaluate the performance of deep neural network prediction model, 24 rain cases in 2017 were forecast for rainfall up to 60 minutes in advance. As a result of evaluating the predicted performance by calculating the mean absolute error (MAE) and critical success index (CSI) at the threshold of 0.1, 1, and 5 mm/hr, the deep neural network model showed better performance in the case of rainfall threshold of 0.1, 1 mm/hr in terms of MAE, and showed better performance than the translation model for lead time 50 minutes in terms of CSI. In particular, although the deep neural network prediction model performed generally better than the translation model for weak rainfall of 5 mm/hr or less, the deep neural network prediction model had limitations in predicting distinct precipitation characteristics of high intensity as a result of the evaluation of threshold of 5 mm/hr. The longer lead time, the spatial smoothness increase with lead time thereby reducing the accuracy of rainfall prediction The translation model turned out to be superior in predicting the exceedance of higher intensity thresholds (> 5 mm/hr) because it preserves distinct precipitation characteristics, but the rainfall position tends to shift incorrectly. This study are expected to be helpful for the improvement of radar rainfall prediction model using deep neural networks in the future. In addition, the massive weather radar data established in this study will be provided through open repositories for future use in subsequent studies.

• Atmosphere
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.47-57
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• 2005

Extending the success of the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), the spaceborne measurement of precipitation by Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) is initiated. The GPM consists of a core satellite which will have a dual-frequency precipitation radar (DPR) and a constellation of small satellites equipped with microwave radiometers. The GPM is inherently a global program. Responding to the GPM plan, many other nations are much interested in participating in the GPM team or simply utilizing GPM products aiming at the development of meteorological technology. Korea can fully function its role if Korea is selected as a CAL/VAL site for the GPM because Korea maintains a well-established dense rain gauge network (AWS), precipitation radars, and the Haenam super site for surface observation. In this feasibility study, the necessities of the GPM project in the context of academical and social backgrounds and associated international and domestic activities are investigated. And GPM-related core technologies and application areas are defined. As a result, it is found that GPM will represent a great opportunity for us because of its ability to provide not only much enhanced three-hourly global rain products but also very useful tools for the enhancement of weather forecasting capabilities, management of water resources, development and implementation of monitoring techniques for severe weather phenomena, agricultural managements and climate application. Furthermore, rain retrieval and CAL/VAL technologies obtained during the involvement in the international GPM project will serve as basic knowledges to run our own geostationary satellite program.