• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.153-162
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• 2017

Today, weather radar is used as a key tool for modern high-tech weather observations and forecasts, along with a wide variety of ground gauges and weather satellites. In this paper, we propose a frequency transform based weather radar image processing technique to improve the weather radar image damaged by beam blocking and clutter removal in order to minimize the uncertainty of the weather radar observation. In the proposed method, DCT based mean energy correction is performed to improve damage caused by beam shielding, and DWT based morphological image processing and high frequency cancellation are performed to improve damage caused by clutter removal. Experimental results show that the application of the proposed method to the damaged original weather radar image improves the quality of weather radar image adaptively to the weather echo feature around the damaged area. In addition, radar QPE calculated from the improved weather radar image was also qualitatively confirmed to be improved by the damage. In the future, we will develop quantitative evaluation scales through continuous research and develop an improved algorithm of the proposed method through numerical comparison.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.473-482
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• 2015

Doppler weather radar is an important tool for meteorological research. Through several decades of development, Doppler weather radar has enormous progress in understanding, detection and warning of meso and micro scale weather system. It makes a significant contribution to weather forecast and weather disaster warning. But the large amount of data process limits the application of Doppler weather radar. This paper proposed for fast weather radar data processing based on CUDA. CDUA is a powerful platform for highly parallel programming developed by NVIDIA. Through running plenty of threads, radar data can be calculated at same time. In experiment, CUDA parallel program can significantly improve weather data processing time.

• Journal of Integrative Natural Science
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.229-237
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• 2011

Today they use a weather radar with spatially high resolution in predicting rainfall intensity and utilizing the information for super short-range forecast in order to make predictions of such severe meteorological phenomena as heavy rainfall and snow. For a weather radar, they use the Z-R relation between the reflectivity factor(Z) and rainfall intensity(R) by rainfall particles in the atmosphere in order to estimate intensity. Most used among the various Z-R relation is $Z=200R^{1.6}$ applied to stratiform rain. It's also used to estimate basic rainfall intensity of a weather radar run by the weather center. This study set out to compare rainfall intensity between the reflectivity of a weather radar and the ground rainfall of ASOS(Automatic Surface Observation System) by analyzing many different cases of heavy rain, analyze the errors of different weather radars and identify their problems, and investigate their applicability to nowcasting in case of severe weather.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2021.05a
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• pp.67-69
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• 2021

Weather radar images can be used in a variety of ways because of their high visibility in terms of visuals. In other words it has the advantage of being able to grasp the flow of weather phenomena using not only the raw data of the weather radar, but also the change characteristics between consecutive images. In particular image processing techniques are gradually expanding in the field of meteorological research, and in the case of image data having high resolution such as weather radar images it is expected to produce useful information through a new approach called image processing techniques. In this study the weather phenomena flow was calculated as a vector from the change of the weather radar image according to time interval with the optical flow method, one of the image processing techniques. The characteristics of the weather phenomena to be analyzed were derived through vector analysis resolution suitable for the scale of weather, vector interpolation in regions where no radar echo exists, and the removal of relative flow vectors to distinguish the flow of specific weather and the entire atmosphere. Through this study, it is expected that not only the use of raw data of weather radar, but also the widening of the application area of weather radar, such as the use of unique characteristics of image data, and the active use of image processing techniques in the field of meteorology in the future.

• Atmosphere
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.77-87
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• 2014

The radar reflectivity is significantly affected by ground clutter, beam blockage, anomalous propagation (AP), birds, insects, chaff, etc. The quality of radar reflectivity is very important in quantitative precipitation estimation. Therefore, Weather Radar Center (WRC) of Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) employed two quality control algorithms: 1) Open Radar Product Generator (ORPG) and 2) fuzzy quality control algorithm to improve quality of radar reflectivity. In this study, an occurrence of AP echoes and the performance of both quality control algorithms are investigated. Consequently, AP echoes frequently occur during the spring and fall seasons. Moreover, while the ORPG QC algorithm has the merit of removing non-precipitation echoes, such as AP echoes, it also removes weak rain echoes and snow echoes. In contrast, the fuzzy QC algorithm has the advantage of preserving snow echoes and weak rain echoes, but it eliminates the partial area of the contaminated echo, including the AP echoes.

• Atmosphere
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.285-300
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• 2011

To discriminate and eliminate chaff echoes in radar measurements, a new removal algorithm in two-dimensional reflectivity composite at the height of 1.5 km has been developed by using the brightness temperature($T_B$) obtained from MTSAT-1R. This algorithm utilizes the fact that chaffs are not appeared in infrared satellite data of MTSAT-1R, but detected in radar measurements due to their significant backscattering in the given radar wavelength. The algorithm is evaluated for three different situations: chaff only, chaff mixed with convective storms, and chaff covered with clouds. The algorithm shows excellent performance for the cases of chaff only and chaff mixed with convective storms. However, the performance of the algorithm significantly depends on the presence of clouds. Thus, the statistical analysis of $T_B$ is performed in order to optimize the monthly threshold.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.689-705
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• 2016

This paper proposed an realtime total monitoring platform for various kind of multi weather radars to analyze and predict weather phenomenons and prevent meteorological disasters. Our platform is designed to process each weather radar data on each radar site to minimize overloads from conversion and transmission of large volumed radar data, and to set observers up the definitive radar data via public framework server separately. By proposed method, weather radar data having different spatial or temporal resolutions can be automatically synchronized with there own spatio-temporal domains on public GIS platform having only one spatio-temporal criterion. Simulation result shows that our method facilitates the realtime weather monitoring from weather radars having various spatio-temporal resolutions without other data synchronization or assimilation processes. Moreover, since this platform doesn't require some additional computer equipments or high-technical mechanisms it has economic efficiency for it's systemic constructions.

• Atmosphere
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.347-360
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• 2020

The automatic algorithm optimized for the Korean Peninsula was developed to detect and track the center of typhoon based on a geometrical method using high-resolution retrieved WISSDOM (WInd Syntheses System using DOppler Measurements) wind and reflectivity data. This algorithm analyzes the center of typhoon by detecting the geometric circular structure of the typhoon's eye in radar reflectivity and vorticity 2D field data. For optimizing the algorithm, the main factors of the algorithm were selected and the optimal thresholds were determined through sensitivity experiments for each factor. The center of typhoon was detected for 5 typhoon cases that approached or landed on Korean Peninsula. The performance was verified by comparing and analyzing from the best track of Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA). The detection rate for vorticity use was 15% higher on average than that for reflectivity use. The detection rate for vorticity use was up to 90% for DIANMU case in 2010. The difference between the detected locations and best tracks of KMA was 0.2° on average when using reflectivity and vorticity. After the optimization, the detection rate was improved overall, especially the detection rate more increased when using reflectivity than using vorticity. And the difference of location was reduced to 0.18° on average, increasing the accuracy.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.18 no.7
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• pp.793-805
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• 2015

Nowadays the amount of data obtained from advanced weather radars is growing to provide higher spatio-temporal resolution. Accordingly radar data compression is important to use limited network bandwidth and storage effectively. In this paper, we proposed a hierarchical compression method for weather radar data having high spatio-temporal resolution. The method is applied to radar reflectivity and evaluated in aspects of accuracy of quantitative rainfall intensity. The technique provides three compression levels from only 1 compressed stream for three radar user groups-signal processor, quality controller, weather analyst. Experimental results show that the method has maximum 13% and minimum 33% of compression rates, and outperforms 25% higher than general compression technique such as gzip.

• Atmosphere
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.365-378
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• 2014

The limits of S-band dual-polarization radars in Korea are not reflected on the recent weather forecasts of Korea Meteorological Administration and furthermore, they are only utilized for rainfall estimations and hydrometeor classification researches. Therefore, this study applied four merging methods [SA (Simple Average), WA (Weighted Average), SSE (Sum of Squared Error), TV (Time-varying mergence)] to the QPE (Quantitative Precipitation Estimation) model [called RAR (Radar-AWS Rainfall) calculation system] using single-polarization radars and S-band dual-polarization radar in order to improve the accuracy of the rainfall estimation of the RAR calculation system. As a result, the merging results of the WA and SSE methods, which are assigned different weights due to the accuracy of the individual model, performed better than the popular merging method, the SA (Simple Average) method. In particular, the results of TVWA (Time-Varying WA) and TVSSE (Time-Varying SSE), which were weighted differently due to the time-varying model error and standard deviation, were superior to the WA and SSE. Among of all the merging methods, the accuracy of the TVWA merging results showed the best performance. Therefore, merging the rainfalls from the RAR calculation system and S-band dual-polarization radar using the merging method proposed by this study enables to improve the accuracy of the quantitative rainfall estimation of the RAR calculation system. Moreover, this study is worthy of the fundamental research on the active utilization of dual-polarization radar for weather forecasts.