Min-Won Jang

A decision support system for agricultural drought management using risk assessment

Since predicted changes in climate will modify temperature and rainfall patterns, there are concerns about the potential impacts of these changes on agricultural drought and agricultural water resources management. An agricultural drought is influenced by several factors such as rainfall, soil characteristics, crops, and reservoir water supply and may be defined as the imbalance of water circulation in paddy and water environments. In particular, soil moisture and water supply for reservoir demand are the most direct and important indicators of agricultural drought events. In the past, conventional drought management approaches based on climatic and meteorological observations have been the primary tools used for measuring drought severity. Because of the spatial and temporal variability and multiple impacts of drought, it is necessary to improve tools to determine the onset, severity, spatial extent, and end of the drought conditions. Improved and available data for mapping and monitoring of this phenomenon are also needed. Effective and efficient drought management can be achieved through drought monitoring based on the ability to assess current conditions and provide improved tools to adapt and mitigate the impacts of future changes. In this article, a methodology is developed to support the risk-based decision-making process involved in agricultural drought management using the following four strategies: drought assessment and monitoring, drought forecast and outlook, drought countermeasures, and drought records management.

Development of A Single Reservoir Agricultural Drought Evaluation Model for Paddy

This study aimed to develop an agricultural drought assessment methodology for irrigated paddy field districts from a single reservoir. Agricultural drought was defined as the reservoir storage shortage state that cannot satisfy water requirement from the paddy fields. The suggested model, SRADEMP (a Single Reservoir Agricultural Drought Evaluation Model for Paddy), was composed of 4 submodels: PWBM (Paddy Water Balance Model), RWBM (Reservoir Water Balance Model), FA (Frequency and probability Analysis model), and DCI (Drought Classification and Indexing model). Two indices, PDF (Paddy Drought Frequency) and PDI (Paddy Drought Index) were also introduced to classify agricultural drought severity Both values were divided into 4 steps, i.e. normal, moderate drought, severe drought, and extreme drought. Each step of PDI was ranged from +4.2 to -1.39, from -1.39 to -3.33, from -3.33 to -4.0 and less than -4.0, respectively. SRADEMP was applied to Jangheung reservoir irrigation district, and the results showed good relationships between simulated results and the observed data including historical drought records showing that SRADEMP explains better the drought conditions in irrigated paddy districts than PDSI.

Comparison between Spatial Interpolation Methods of Temperature Data for Garlic Cultivation

The objective of this study is to decide a spatial interpolation method on temperature data for the suitability analysis of garlic cultivation. In Korea, garlic is the second most cultivated condiment vegetable after red pepper. Nowadays warm-temperate garlic faces potential shift of its arable area according to warmer temperature in the Korean Peninsula, and the change can be drawn with the precise temperature map derived from interpolation on point-measured data. To find the preferable interpolation method in cases of germination and vegetative period of the garlic, different approaches were tested as follows: Inverse Distance Weighted (IDW), Spline, Ordinary Kriging (OK), and Universal Kriging (UK). As a result, IDW and UK show the lowest root mean square errors as for the germination and vegetative seasons, respectively. However, statistically significant difference was not revealed among the applied methods regarding the germinating period. Eventually this will contribute to mapping the suitable lands for the cultivation of warm-temperate garlic reasonably.

Assessing Southern-type Garlic Suitability with regards to Soil and Temperature Conditions

This study was carried out to evaluate the land suitability for southern-type garlic cultivation associated with both temperature and soil constraints. The suitability analysis was conducted with hourly temperature data from 2001 to 2010 at all fifty seven meteorological stations and the soil-based suitability map of garlic provided by Rural Development Administration. Firstly the temperature data were processed by the growth stages (germinating, bulbing, and winter vegetation season), and then were adopted to limit the irrelevant lands. Next, as a result of overlaying each soil and temperature suitability map, the total 274,339 ha of area was mapped as highly suitable or suitable for southern-type garlic cultivation and the top four of the largest classified si-guns were identified as Naju, Jeongeup, Gochang, and Jinju. On the other hand, the statistical records of KOSIS (KOrea Statistical Information Service) showed lower amount of cultivation area than the analyzed results in the major production sites, Goheung, Sinan, Haenam, and Muan. However, it should not be regarded as exceptional because farmer’s preference might not correspond to potential land usability.

Watershed Scale Drought Assessment using Soil Moisture Index

Although the drought impacts are comparably not catastrophic, the results from the drought are fatal in various social and economical aspects. Different from other natural hazards including floods, drought advances slowly and spreads widely, so that the preparedness is quite important and effective to mitigate the impacts from drought. Soil moisture depletion directly resulted from rainfall shortage is highly related with drought, especially for crops and vegetations, therefore a drought can be evaluated using soil moisture conditions. In this study, SMI (Soil Moisture Index) was developed to measure a drought condition using soil moisture model and frequency analysis for return periods. Runs theory was applied to quantify the soil moisture depletions for the drought condition in terms of severity, magnitude and duration. In 1994, 1995, 2000, and 2001, Korea had experienced several severe droughts, so the SMI developed was applied to evaluate applicability in the mid-range hydrologic unit watershed scale. From the results, SMI demonstrated the drought conditions with a quite sensitive manner and can be used as an indicator to measure a drought condition.

Application of Meteorological Drought Indices for North Korea

North Korea is one of the vulnerable countries facing the threat of a drought, so that it is unavoidable to experience fatal damage when drought is occurred, and it is necessary to improve the drought response capability of water resources systems. However, it is still difficult to find research efforts for drought characteristics and drought management in North Korea. This study is to quantify drought duration and magnitude and to analyze drought characteristics in North Korea. In order to quantitatively identify historical drought conditions and to evaluate their variability, drought indices are commonly used. In this study, drought indices including dry-day index, deciles of normal precipitation, Phillips drought index, standardized precipitation index and Palmer drought severity index are calculated and compared monthly using the weather data for the twenty one meteorological stations in North Korea. The indices compared with the drought damage records that have reported from 1990 to present to understand how the indices can explain the drought. A comparative study was also conducted to evaluate the relative severity of the significant droughts occurred during 2000 and 2001 which were reported as the worst drought in North Korea. Drought indices calculated from this study demonstrated that those can be the effective tools in quantitatively evaluating drought severity and measures of drought. Thus it is recommended the distributed trend of drought be considered when the plan or measures for drought in North Korea are established.

Assessment and Classification of Meteorological Drought Severity in North Korea

North Korea is one of the most vulnerable countries of the world for drought but still it is difficult to find scientific researches for understanding of the drought characteristics. This study analyzed the temporal and spatial distribution of meterological drought severity and classified the drought development types in North Korea. All eleven drought indices were tested such as seasonal rainfall, PDS, SPI and so on, and then drew the drought risk map by each indicator using frequency analysis and GIS(Geographic Information Systems) for twenty one meteorological stations. In addition meteorological drought characteristics in North Korea was classified to six patterns on Si/Gun administrative units using cluster analysis on the drought indicators. The cluster III has the strongly drought-resistant area due to sufficient rainfall and the cluster V was considered as the most drought-vulnerable area, Pungsan and Sinpo, because of the severest drought condition for eight drought indicators. The results of this study are expected to be provided for the basic understanding of regionalized drought severity and characteristics confronting the risk of drought from climate variations in North Korea.

Web-based GIS for Real Time Hydrologic Topographical Data Extraction for the Geum River Watershed in Korea

Watershed topographical information is required in hydrologic analysis, supporting efficient hydrologic model operation and managing water resources. Watershed topographical data extraction systems based on desktop GIS are abundant these days placing burdens for spatial data processing on users. This paper describes development of a Web-based Geographic Information Systems that can delineate the Geum River sub-basins and extract watershed topographical data in real time. Through this system, users can obtain a watershed boundary by selecting outlet location and then extracting topographical data including watershed area, boundary length, average altitude, slope distribution about the elevation range with Web browsers. Moreover, the system provides watershed hydrological data including land use, soil types, soil drainage conditions, and NRCS(Natural Resources Conservation Service) curve number for hydrologic model operation through grid overlay technique. The system operability was evaluated with the hydrological data of WAMIS(Water Management Information System) with the government operation Web site as reference data.

Analysis of Spring Drought Using NOAA/AVHRR NDVI for North Korea

Different vegetation indices from satellite images have been used for monitoring drought damages, and this study aimed to develop a drought index using NOAA/AVHRR NDVI(Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) and to analyze the temporal and spatial distribution of spring drought severity in North Korea from 1998 to 2001. A new drought index, DevNDVI(Deviation of NDVI), was defined as the difference between a monthly NDVI and average monthly NDVI at the same cover area, and the DevNDVI images at all years except for 2001 demonstrated the drought-damaged areas referred from various domestic and foreign publications. The vegetation of 2001 showed high vitality despite the least amount of rainfall among the target years, and the reason was investigated that higher temperature above normal average would shift the growing stages of plants ahead. Therefore, complementary methods like plant growth models or ground survey data should be adopted in order to evaluate drought-induced plant stress using satellite-based NDVI and to make up far the distortion induced by other environments than lack of precipitation.

Assessment of agricultural drought vulnerability to climate change at a municipal level in South Korea

This study aimed to analyze the future vulnerability to agricultural drought of the Korean administrative units of cities (Si) and counties (Gun) following the climate change phenomenon. To assess the vulnerability in a quantitative manner and also to deal with different physical and socioeconomic data on the occurrence of agricultural drought, principal component analysis (PCA), a multivariate statistical analysis method, was adopted, and a vulnerability index, regional vulnerability index to agricultural drought (RVIAD), was suggested. RVIAD having a range from 0.0 to 1.0 was calculated by rescaling the weighted summation of principal component scores. The analysis was performed with all 21 standardized variables in each administrative unit of Si and Gun: 3 sensitivity variables, 8 exposure variables, and 10 adaptation variables. It resulted in four principal components explaining about 85.7% of the total variance, and the third principal component, comprised of only climate variables, was used for applying future climate data from the RCP 8.5 scenario. The districts of Chungchongnam-Do (M1), Jeollabuk-Do (L1), and Jeollanam-Do (L2) were evaluated as having the highest vulnerability to agricultural drought based on the climate change scenario, not only in the present but also in future. Despite the limitation inherent in the PCA, the approach in this study could reflect different factors other than climate factors on minimizing subjective interruption, and such is expected to contribute to improving the decision-making for diagnosing the drought adaptation capacity in a region and developing measures to mitigate the drought damage.