• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.37 no.5_3
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• pp.1373-1387
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• 2021

Forest fire poses a significant threat to the environment and society, affecting carbon cycle and surface energy balance, and resulting in socioeconomic losses. Widely used multi-spectral satellite image-based approaches for burned area detection have a problem in that they do not work under cloudy conditions. Therefore, in this study, Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data from Europe Space Agency, which can be collected in all weather conditions, were used to identify forest fire damaged area based on a series of processes including Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and K-means clustering. Four forest fire cases, which occurred in Gangneung·Donghae and Goseong·Sokcho in Gangwon-do of South Korea and two areas in North Korea on April 4, 2019, were examined. The estimated burned areas were evaluated using fire reference data provided by the National Institute of Forest Science (NIFOS) for two forest fire cases in South Korea, and differenced normalized burn ratio (dNBR) for all four cases. The average accuracy using the NIFOS reference data was 86% for the Gangneung·Donghae and Goseong·Sokcho fires. Evaluation using dNBR showed an average accuracy of 84% for all four forest fire cases. It was also confirmed that the stronger the burned intensity, the higher detection the accuracy, and vice versa. Given the advantage of SAR remote sensing, the proposed statistical processing and K-means clustering-based approach can be used to quickly identify forest fire damaged area across the Korean Peninsula, where a cloud cover rate is high and small-scale forest fires frequently occur.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.34 no.6_4
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• pp.1503-1517
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• 2018

Mt. Baekdu is a stratovolcano located at the border between China and North Korea and is known to have formed through its differentiation stage after the Oligocene epoch in the Cenozoic era. There has been a growing interest in the magma re-activity of Mt. Baekdu volcano since 2010. Several research projects have been conducted by government such as Korea Meteorological Administration and Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources. Because, however, the Mt. Baekdu volcano is located far from South Korea, it is quite difficult to collect in-situ observations by terrestrial equipment. Remote sensing is a science to analyze and interpret information without direct physical contact with a target object. Various types of platform such as automobile, unmanned aerial vehicle, aircraft and satellite can be used for carrying a payload. In the past several decades, numerous volcanic studies have been conducted by remotely sensed observations using wide spectrum of wavelength channels in electromagnetic waves. In particular, radar remote sensing has been widely used for volcano monitoring in that microwave channel can gather surface's information without less limitation like day and night or weather condition. Radar interferometric technique which utilized phase information of radar signal enables to estimate surface displacement such as volcano, earthquake, ground subsidence or glacial movement, etc. In 2018, long-term research project for collaborative observation for Mt. Baekdu volcano between Korea and China were selected by Korea government. A volcanic specialized research center has been established by the selected project. The purpose of this paper is to introduce about remote sensing techniques for volcano monitoring and to review selected studies with remote sensing techniques to monitor Mt. Baekdu volcano. The acquisition status of the archived observations of six synthetic aperture radar satellites which are in orbit now was investigated for application of radar interferometry to monitor Mt. Baekdu volcano. We will conduct a time-series analysis using collected synthetic aperture radar images.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.5_1
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• pp.627-646
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• 2022

Recently, the seriousness of climate change-related problems caused by global warming is growing, and the average temperature is also rising. As a result, it is affecting the environment in which various temperature-sensitive creatures and creatures live, and changes in the ecosystem are also being detected. Seasons are one of the important factors influencing the types, distribution, and growth characteristics of creatures living in the area. Among the most popular and easily recognized plant seasonal phenomena among the indicators of the climate change impact evaluation, the blooming day of flower and the peak day of autumn leaves were modeled. The types of plants used in the modeling were forsythia and cherry trees, which can be seen as representative plants of spring, and maple and ginkgo, which can be seen as representative plants of autumn. Weather data used to perform modeling were temperature, precipitation, and solar radiation observed through the ASOS Observatory of the Korea Meteorological Administration. As satellite data, MODIS NDVI was used for modeling, and it has a correlation coefficient of about -0.2 for the flowering date and 0.3 for the autumn leaves peak date. As the model used, the model was established using multiple regression models, which are linear models, and Random Forest, which are nonlinear models. In addition, the predicted values estimated by each model were expressed as isopleth maps using spatial interpolation techniques to express the trend of plant seasonal changes from 2003 to 2020. It is believed that using NDVI with high spatio-temporal resolution in the future will increase the accuracy of plant phenology modeling.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.256-266
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• 2022

Empirical models including the Angstrom-Prescott (AP) model have been used to estimate solar radiation at sites, which would support a wide use of crop models. The objective of this study was to estimate two sets of solar radiation estimates using the AP coefficients derived for climate zone (AP_Frere) and specific site (AP_Choi), respectively. The daily solar radiation was estimated at 18 sites in Korea where long-term measurements of solar radiation were available. In the present study, daily solar radiation and sunshine duration were collected for the period from 2012 to 2021. Daily weather data including maximum and minimum temperatures and rainfall were also obtained to prepare input data to a process-based crop model, CERES-Rice model included in Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT). It was found that the daily estimates of solar radiation using the climate zone specific coefficient, SFrere, had significantly less error than those using site-specific coefficients S_Choi (p<0.05). The cumulative values of S_Frere for the period from march to September also had less error at 55% of study sites than those of S_Choi. Still, the use of S_Frere and S_Choi as inputs to the CERES-Rice model resulted in slight differences between the outcomes of crop growth simulations, which had no significant difference between these outputs. These results suggested that the AP coefficients for the temperate climate zone would be preferable for the estimation of solar radiation. This merits further evaluation studies to compare the AP model with other sophisticated approaches such as models based on satellite data.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.2
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• pp.207-221
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• 2023

This study suggests deep neural network models for estimating air temperature with Level 1B (L1B) datasets of GEO-KOMPSAT-2A (GK-2A). The temperature at 1.5 m above the ground impact not only daily life but also weather warnings such as cold and heat waves. There are many studies to assume the air temperature from the land surface temperature (LST) retrieved from satellites because the air temperature has a strong relationship with the LST. However, an algorithm of the LST, Level 2 output of GK-2A, works only clear sky pixels. To overcome the cloud effects, we apply a deep neural network (DNN) model to assume the air temperature with L1B calibrated for radiometric and geometrics from raw satellite data and compare the model with a linear regression model between LST and air temperature. The root mean square errors (RMSE) of the air temperature for model outputs are used to evaluate the model. The number of 95 in-situ air temperature data was 2,496,634 and the ratio of datasets paired with LST and L1B show 42.1% and 98.4%. The training years are 2020 and 2021 and 2022 is used to validate. The DNN model is designed with an input layer taking 16 channels and four hidden fully connected layers to assume an air temperature. As a result of the model using 16 bands of L1B, the DNN with RMSE 2.22℃ showed great performance than the baseline model with RMSE 3.55℃ on clear sky conditions and the total RMSE including overcast samples was 3.33℃. It is suggested that the DNN is able to overcome cloud effects. However, it showed different characteristics in seasonal and hourly analysis and needed to append solar information as inputs to make a general DNN model because the summer and winter seasons showed a low coefficient of determinations with high standard deviations.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.6_1
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• pp.1341-1352
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• 2023

The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) derived from satellite images is a crucial tool to monitor forests and agriculture for broad areas because the periodic acquisition of the data is ensured. However, optical sensor-based vegetation indices(VI) are not accessible in some areas covered by clouds. This paper presented a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) based approach to retrieval of the optical sensor-based NDVI using machine learning. SAR system can observe the land surface day and night in all weather conditions. Radar vegetation indices (RVI) from the Sentinel-1 vertical-vertical (VV) and vertical-horizontal (VH) polarizations, surface elevation, and air temperature are used as the input features for an automated machine learning (AutoML) model to conduct the gap-filling of the Sentinel-2 NDVI. The mean bias error (MAE) was 7.214E-05, and the correlation coefficient (CC) was 0.878, demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed method. This approach can be applied to gap-free nationwide NDVI construction using Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 images for environmental monitoring and resource management.