• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2016.05a
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• pp.164-164
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• 2016

Radar rainfall estimates have been widely used in calculating rainfall amount approximately and predicting flood risks. The radar rainfall estimates have a number of error sources such as beam blockage and ground clutter hinder their applications to hydrological flood forecasting. Moreover, it has been reported in paper that those errors are inter-correlated spatially and temporally. Therefore, in the current study, we tested influence about spatio-temporal errors in radar rainfall estimates. Spatio-temporal errors were simulated through a stochastic simulation model, called Multivariate Autoregressive (MAR). For runoff simulation, the Nam River basin in South Korea was used with the distributed rainfall-runoff model, Vflo. The results indicated that spatio-temporal dependent errors caused much higher variations in peak discharge than spatial dependent errors. To further investigate the effect of the magnitude of time correlation among radar errors, different magnitudes of temporal correlations were employed during the rainfall-runoff simulation. The results indicated that strong correlation caused a higher variation in peak discharge. This concluded that the effects on reducing temporal and spatial correlation must be taken in addition to correcting the biases in radar rainfall estimates. Acknowledgements This research was supported by a grant from a Strategic Research Project (Development of Flood Warning and Snowfall Estimation Platform Using Hydrological Radars), which was funded by the Korea Institute of Construction Technology.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.46 no.11
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• pp.1041-1052
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• 2013

In this study, we estimate parameters of a distributed hydrologic model, GRM (grid based rainfall-runoff model), using a model-independent parameter estimation tool, PEST. We implement auto calibration of model parameters such as initial soil moisture, multipliers of overland roughness and soil hydraulic conductivity in the Geumho River Catchment and the Gamcheon Catchment using radar rainfall estimates and ground-observed rainfall represented by Thiessen interpolation. Automatic calibration is performed by GRM-MP (multiple projects), a modified version of GRM without GUI (graphic user interface) implementation, and "Parallel PEST" to improve estimation efficiency. Although ground rainfall shows similar or higher cumulative amount compared to radar rainfall in the areal average, high spatial variation is found only in radar rainfall. In terms of accuracy of hydrologic simulations, radar rainfall is equivalent or superior to ground rainfall. In the case of radar rainfall, the estimated multiplier of soil hydraulic conductivity is lower than 1, which may be affected by high rainfall intensity of radar rainfall. Other parameters such as initial soil moisture and the multiplier of overland roughness do not show consistent trends in the calibration results. Overall, calibrated parameters show different patterns in radar and ground rainfall, which should be carefully considered in the rainfall-runoff modelling applications using radar rainfall.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.51 no.9
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• pp.813-826
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• 2018

Recently, weather radar system has been widely used for effectively monitoring near real-time weather conditions. The radar rainfall estimates are generally relies on the Z-R equation that is an indirect approximation of the empirical relationship. In this regards, the bias in the radar rainfall estimates can be affected by spatial-temporal variations in the radar profile. This study evaluates the uncertainty of the Z-R relationship while considering the rainfall types in the process of estimating the parameters of the Z-R equation in the context of stochastic approach. The radar rainfall estimates based on the Bayesian inference technique appears to be effective in terms of reduction in bias for a given season. The derived Z-R equation using Bayesian model enables us to better represent the hydrological process in the rainfall-runoff model and provide a more reliable forecast.

• 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 Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.53 no.7
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• pp.493-505
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• 2020

The rainfall-runoff model has been generally adopted to obtain a consistent runoff sequence with the use of the long-term ground-gauged based precipitation data. The Thiessen polygon is a commonly applied approach for estimating the mean areal rainfall from the ground-gauged precipitation by assigning weight based on the relative areas delineated by a polygon. However, spatial bias is likely to increase due to a sparse network of the rain gauge. This study aims to generate continuous runoff sequences with the mean areal rainfall obtained from radar rainfall estimates through a PRMS rainfall-runoff model. Here, the systematic error of radar rainfall is corrected by applying the G/R Ratio. The results showed that the estimated runoff using the corrected radar rainfall estimates are largely similar and comparable to that of the Thiessen. More importantly, one can expect that the mean areal rainfall obtained from the radar rainfall estimates are more desirable than that of the ground in terms of representing rainfall patterns in space, which in turn leads to significant improvement in the estimation of runoff.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2021.06a
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• pp.275-275
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• 2021

A fixed Z-R relationship approach, such as the Marshall-Palmer relationship, for an entire year and for different seasons can be problematic in cases where the relationship varies spatially and temporally throughout a region. From this perspective, this study explores the use of long-term radar reflectivity for South Korea to obtain a nationwide calibrated Z-R relationship and the associated uncertainties within a Bayesian regression framework. This study also investigates seasonal differences in the Z-R relationship and their roles in reducing systematic error. Distinct differences in the Z-R parameters in space are identified, and more importantly, an inverse relationship between the parameters is clearly identified with distinct regimes based on the seasons. A spatially structured pattern in the parameters exists, particularly parameter α for the wet season and parameter β for the dry season. A pronounced region of high values during the wet and dry seasons may be partially associated with storm movements in that season. Finally, the radar rainfall estimates through the calibrated Z-R relationship are compared with the existing Z-R relationships for estimating stratiform rainfall and convective rainfall. Overall, the radar rainfall fields based on the proposed modeling procedure are similar to the observed rainfall fields, whereas the radar rainfall fields obtained from the existing Marshall-Palmer Z-R relationship show a systematic underestimation. The obtained Z-R relationships are validated by testing the predictions on unseen radar-gauge pairs in the year 2018, in the context of cross-validation. The cross-validation results are largely similar to those in the calibration process, suggesting that the derived Z-R relationships fit the radar-gauge pairs reasonably well.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.51 no.3
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• pp.221-233
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• 2018

Recently, the flood damage by the localized heavy rainfall and typhoon have been frequently occurred due to the climate change. Accurate rainfall forecasting and flood runoff estimates are needed to reduce such damages. However, the uncertainties are involved in guage rainfall, radar rainfall, and the estimated runoff hydrograph from rainfall-runoff models. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify the uncertainty of rainfall by generating a probabilistic radar rainfall ensemble and confirm the uncertainties of hydrological models through the analysis of the simulated runoffs from the models. The blending technique is used to estimate a single integrated or an optimal runoff hydrograph by the simulated runoffs from multi rainfall-runoff models. The radar ensemble is underestimated due to the influence of rainfall intensity and topography and the uncertainty of the rainfall ensemble is large. From the study, it will be helpful to estimate and predict the accurate runoff to prepare for the disaster caused by heavy rainfall.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.52 no.9
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• pp.589-601
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• 2019

Various applications of radar rainfall data have been actively employed in the field of hydro-meteorology. Since radar rainfall is estimated by using predefined reflectivity-rainfall intensity relationships, they may not have sufficient reproducibility of observations. In this study, a generalized linear model is introduced to better capture the Z-R relationship in the context of bias correction within a Bayesian regression framework. The bias-corrected radar rainfall with the generalized linear model is more accurate than the widely used mean field bias correction method. In addition, we analyzed variability of the bias correction parameters under various geomorphological conditions such as the height of the weather station and the separation distance from the radar. The identified relationship is finally used to derive a regionalized formula which can provide bias correction factors over the entire watershed. It can be concluded that the bias correction parameters and regionalized method obtained from this study could be useful in the field of radar hydrology.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.39 no.4 s.165
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• pp.335-346
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• 2006

Among various input data to hydrologic models, rainfall measurements arguably have the most critical influence on the performance of hydrologic model. Traditionally, hydrologic models have relied on point gauge measurements to provide the area-averaged rainfall information. However, rainfall estimates from gauges become inadequate due to their poor representation of areal rainfall, especially in situations with sparse gauge network. Alternatively, radar that covers much larger areas has become an attractive instrument for providing area- averaged precipitation information. Despite of the limitation of the QPE(Quantitative Precipitation Estimation) using radar, we can get the better information of spatial variability of rainfall fields. Also, rain-gauges give us the better quantitative information of rainfall field. Therefore, in this study, we developed improved methodologies tu estimate rainfall fields using an ordinary cokriging technique which optimally merges radar reflectivity data into rain-gauges data.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.34 no.5
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• pp.1443-1454
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• 2014

In this study, we assess impact of spatial resolution of radar rainfall and a distributed hydrologic model on parameter estimation and rainfall-runoff response. Radar data measured by S-band polarimetric radar located at Mt. Bisl in the year of 2012 are used for the comparative study. As different rainfall estimates such as R-KDP, R-Z, and R-ZDR show good agreement with ground rainfall, R-KDP are applied for rainfall-runoff modeling due to relatively high accuracy in terms of catchment averaged and gauging point rainfall. GRM (grid based rainfall-runoff model) is implemented for flood simulations at the Geumho River catchment with spatial resolutions of 200m, 500m, and 1000m. Automatic calibration is performed by PEST (model independent parameter estimation tool) to find suitable parameters for each spatial resolution. For 200m resolution, multipliers of overlandflow and soil hydraulic conductivity are estimated within stable ranges, while high variations are found from results for 500m and 1000m resolution. No tendency is found in the estimated initial soil moisture. When parameters estimated for different spatial resolution are applied for other resolutions, 200m resolution model shows higher sensitivity compared to 1000m resolution model.