• Atmosphere
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.343-364
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• 2014

This study presents local and synoptic conditions associated with extreme heavy snowfall events in the Yeongdong region, as well as the temporal and spatial variability of these conditions. During the last 12 years (2001~2012), 3 extreme snowfall events occurred in the Yeongdong region, which recorded daily snowfall greater than 50 cm, respectively. In these events, one of the noticeable features is the occurrence of heavy hourly snowfall greater than 10 cm. It was reported from satellite analysis that these heavy snowfall may be closely related to mesoscale convective clouds. In this paper the 3 extreme events are examined on their synoptic environments associated with the developments of mesoscale convective system using numerical model output. These 3 events all occurred in strongly forced synoptic environments where 500 and 300 hPa troughs and 500 hPa thermal troughs were evident. From the analysis of diagnostic variables, it was found in all 3 events that absolute vorticity and cold air advection were dominant in the Yeongdong region and its surrounding sea at upper levels, especially at around 500 hPa (absolute vorticity: $20{\sim}60{\times}10^{-5}s^{-1}$, cold air advection: $-10{\sim}-20^{\circ}C$ $12hr^{-1}$). Moreover, the spatial distributions of cold advection showed mostly the shape of a narrow band along the eastern coast of Korea. These features of absolute vorticity and cold advection at 500 hPa were sustained for about 10 hours before the occurrence of maximum hourly snowfall.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.401-410
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• 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 for Aviation and Aeronautics
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.54-62
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• 2008

International organizations related to air transport such as ICAO, IATA, ACI are forecasting that the number of passenger will grow about 4.4% annually up to 2015. Therefore, the innovation of given system technology and operation procedure is required in global scale to cope with the increase of air traffic demand. CNS/ATM infrastructure based on satellite is considered to play key role in order to solve the problems due to the dramatic increase of air traffic demand over the world. Free flight concept in the air transport operation has been proved with CNS/ATM infrastructure especially in USA and Europe. Therefore, it is necessary to develop key technologies to overcome technology gap and to secure international competitiveness in Korea. ADS-B is an important issue, and new element technologies should be considered as essential items which were shown in Capstone project. Nowadays, the free flight concept is combined to Air Transport Road Map such as NextGen project in USA, SESAR in Europe. In this process, free flight is included in the concepts such as ATM(Air Traffic Management), aviation security and safety, environmental protection and economy development, wide area weather variable reduction service, information integration and application between the related authorities (civil/military) etc. The purpose of research is to establish mid-term and long-term infrastructure plan and strategy for free flight realization in Korea. The analysis of action target and equipment construction status, phase construction plan of infrastructure has been performed by considering mid-term and long-term free flight plans of USA and Europe.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• 2004.10a
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• pp.192-195
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• 2004

Products of gridded surface wind and windstress vectors over the world ocean have been constructed by satellite scatterometer data with highly temporal and spatial resolutions. Even if the ADEOS-II/SeaWinds has supplied surface wind data only for short duration in Apr. to Oct. 2003 to us, it permits us to construct a product with higher resolution together with the Qscat/SeaWinds. In addition to our basic product with its resolution of $1^{\circ}\times1^{\circ}$ in space and daily in time, we try to construct products with $1/2^{\circ}\times1/2^{\circ}$ and semi- and quarter-daily resolution. These products are validated by inter-comparison with in-situ data (TAO and NDBC buoys), and also compared with numerical weather prediction(NWP) ones (NCEP reanalysis). Result reveals that our product has higher reliability in the study area than the NCEP's. For the open ocean regions in the middle and high latitudes where there are no in-situ data, we find that there are clear differences between them. Especially in the southern westerly region of 400-600S, the' wind-stress magnitudes by the NCEP are significantly larger than the others, suggesting that they are overestimated. We also calculate wind-stress curl field that is an important factor for ocean dynamics and focus its spatial character in the northwestern Pacific around Japan. Positive curl areas are found to cover from southwest to northeast in our focus region and almost correspond to the Kuroshio path. It is suggested that the vorticity field in the lower atmosphere is related to the upper oceanic one, and thus an aspect of air-sea interaction process.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• v.2
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• pp.981-984
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• 2006

Oil pollution of the ocean is a major environmental problem, especially in its coastal zones. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) flown on satellites, such as ERS-2 and Envisat, has been proved to be a useful tool in oil spill monitoring due to its wide coverage, day and night, and all-weather capability. The total 120 SAR images containing oil spill over the East China Sea were collected and analyzed, ranging in date from July 23, 2002 to November 11, 2005. After preprocessed, SAR images were segmented by adaptive threshold method. The oil spill images were incorporated into GIS after distinguished from look-like phenomena, finally we presented the oil spills distribution map for the East China Sea. The wide-swath and quick-looks SAR imagery for mapping of oil spill distribution over large marine areas were proved to be useful when full resolution data are not available. After the temporal and spatial distribution of the oil spills were analyzed, we found that most of oil spills were distributed along the main ship routes, which means the illegal discharge by ships, and the occurrence of oil spill detected on SAR images acquired during morning and summer is much higher than during evening and winter.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• v.2
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• pp.590-593
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• 2006

Timber inventory management includes to measure and update forest attributes, which is crucial information for private companies and public organizations in property assessment and environment monitoring. Field measurement would be accurate, but time-consuming and inefficient. For the reason, remote sensing technology has been an alternative to field measurement from an economic perspective. Among several sensors, LiDAR and Radar interferometry are known for their efficiency for forest monitoring because they are less influenced by weather and light conditions, and provide reasonably accurate vertical/horizontal measurement for a large area in a short period. For example, Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) and National Elevation Dataset (NED) in the U.S. can provide tree height information and DSM. On the other hand, LiDAR DSM (the first return) and DEM (the last return) can also present tree height estimation. With respect to project site of loblolly pine plantation in Louisiana in the U.S., the accuracy of SRTM C-Band approach estimating tree height was assessed by the LiDAR approaches. In addition, SRTM X-Band and NED were also compared with the results. Plantation year in inventory GIS, which is directly related to forest age, is high correlated with the difference between SRTM C-Band and NED. As a byproduct, several stands of age mismatch could be recognized using an outlier detection algorithm, and optical satellite image (ETM+) were used to verify the mismatch. The findings of this study were (1) the confirmation of usefulness of the SRTM DSM for forest monitoring and (2) Multi-sensors- Radar, LiDAR, ETM+, MODIS can be used for accuracy improvement of forest inventory GIS altogether.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.27 no.6
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• pp.677-686
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• 2006

Surface evapotranspiration is one of the most important factors to determine the surface energy budget, and its estimation is strongly related with the accuracy of weather forecasting. Surface evapotranspiration over Daegu Metropolitan was estimated using high resolution LANDSAT TM data. The estimation of surface evapotranspiration is based on the relationship between surface radiative temperature and vegetation index provided by a TM sensor. The distribution of NDVI (Normalized Difference of Vegetation Index) corresponds well with that of land-used in Deagu Metropolitan. The temperature of several part of downtown in Deagu metropolitan is lower in comparison with the averaged radiative temperature. This is caused by the high evapotranspiration from dense vegetation like DooRyu Park in Deagu Metropolitan. But, weak evapotranspiration availability is distinguished over the central part of downtown and the difference of evapotranspiration availability on industrial complexes and residential area is also clear.

• Journal of Korean Society for Geospatial Information Science
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.79-87
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• 2008

There has been a strong demand for low altitude UAV development in rapid mapping not only to acquire high resolution image with much more low cost and weather independent, compared to satellite surveying or traditional aerial surveying, but also to meet many needs of the aerial photogrammetry. Especially, efficient geocoding of UAV imagery is the key issue. Contrary to high UAV potential for civilian applications, the technology development in photogrammetry for example direct georeferencing is in the early stage and it requires further research and additional technical development. In this study, two approaches are supposed for automatic geocoding of UAV still images by simple affine transformation and block adjustment of affine transformation using minimal ground control points and also evaluated the applicability and quality of geometric model compared to geocoded images generated by commercial S/W.

• Atmosphere
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.39-48
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• 2014

This study provides a comparative analysis of cloud top heights observed by a Ka-band cloud radar and the Communication, Ocean and Meteorological Satellite (COMS) at Boseong National Center for Intensive Observation of severe weather (NCIO) from May 25, 2013 (1600 UTC) to May 27. The rainfall duration is defined as the period of rainfall from start to finish, and the no rainfall duration is defined as the period other than the rainfall duration. As a result of the comparative analysis, the cloud top heights observed by the cloud radar have been estimated to be lower than that observed by the COMS for the rainfall duration due to the signal attenuation caused by raindrops. The stronger rainfall intensity gets, the more the difference grows. On the other hand, the cloud top heights observed by the cloud radar have been relatively similar to that observed by the COMS for the no rainfall duration. In this case, the cloud radar can effectively detect cloud top heights within the range of its observation. The COMS indicates the cloud top heights lower than the actual ones due to the upper thin clouds under the influence of ground surface temperature. As a result, the cloud radar can be useful in detecting cloud top heights when there are no precipitation events. The COMS data can be used to correct the cloud top heights when the radar gets beyond the valid range of observation or there are precipitation events.

• Atmosphere
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.331-346
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• 2013

A case study of mesoscale snowfall with polar low signature during 25~26 December 2010 in South Korea is presented. The data used for analysis include surface and upper level weather charts, rain gauge, sea surface temperature, satellite imagery, sounding, and global $1^{\circ}{\times}1^{\circ}$ reanalysis data. The system initiated with a surface trough near the bay of Bohai but quickly intensified to become a polar low within 12 hours. The polar low moved southeastward bringing snowfall to southwestern Korea. There was strong instability layer beneath 800 hPa but baroclinicty was weak and disappeared as the low progressed onto land. Shortwave at 500 hPa and the surface trough became in-phase which hindered the development of the polar low while it approached Korea. However, there were strong tropopause folding (~500 hPa) and high potential vorticity (PV), which allowed the system to maintain its structure and dump 20.3 cm of snow in Jeonju. Synoptic, thermodynamic, dynamic, and moisture analyses reveal that polar low developed in an area of baroclinicity with strong conditional instability and warm air advection at the lower levels. Further, the development of a surface trough to polar low was aided by tropopause folding with PV advection in the upper level, shortwave trough at 500 hPa, and moisture advection with low-level jet (LLJ) of 15 m $s^{-1}$ or more at 850 hPa. Maximum snowfall was concentrated in this region with convection being sustained by latent heat release.