Won-Ho Nam

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.

Assessment of water delivery efficiency in irrigation canals using performance indicators

Agricultural water is delivered by open irrigation canals in system of reservoirs with a widespread distribution in South Korea. Traditional irrigation management problems include water distribution systems with less capacity than the peak demand, irregular delivery rates, and low irrigation efficiency and uniformity. It is necessary to strategically compare the estimated irrigation demands with the actual water supplies for decision making in order to maintain the water supply according to the demand. Accurate measurement and monitoring of water distribution systems is essential in order to solve the problems of water efficiency and availability. Auto water level gauges installed at the head and tail sections of each irrigation canal in the Dongjin River were used to measure the discharge during irrigation periods. In this study, we introduced an approach to assess the water delivery performance indicators of the open irrigation canals, which is essential for identifying the key issues for water management improvement. The irrigation efficiencies according to the water delivery performance indicators were measured with an automatic water gauge in the irrigation canals and were calculated from the spatial and temporal distribution of the water supply for the lack of planning in water delivery. The calculated performance indicators are useful to understand the irrigator behavior and general irrigation trends. Analysis of the results yielded insights into possible improvement methods in order to develop water management policies that enable irrigation planners to improve the temporal uniformity and equity in the water distribution.

Vulnerability Assessment of Water Supply in Agricultural Reservoir Utilizing Probability Distribution and Reliability Analysis Methods

The change of rainfall pattern and hydrologic factors due to climate change increases the occurrence probability of agricultural reservoir water shortage. Water supply assessment of reservoir is usually performed current reservoir level compared to historical water levels or the simulation of reservoir operation based on the water budget analysis. Since each reservoir has the native property for watershed, irrigation district and irrigation water requirement, it is necessary to improve the assessment methods of agricultural reservoir water capability about water resources system. This study proposed a practical methods that water supply vulnerability assessment for an agricultural reservoir based on a concept of probabilistic reliability. The vulnerability assessment of water supply is calculated from probability distribution of water demand condition and water supply condition that influences on water resources management and reservoir operations. The water supply vulnerability indices are estimated to evaluate the performance of water supply on agricultural reservoir system, and thus it is recommended a more objective method to evaluate water supply reliability.

Assessment of Irrigation Efficiencies using Smarter Water Management

Efficient water operation and management of an irrigation system plays an important element in the sustainability of irrigated agriculture. An agricultural water is delivered in many open canals of irrigation delivery system by reservoirs. The poor water distribution and management in an irrigation system is a major factor leading to low water efficiency. It is necessary to compare the estimated irrigation demands with the actual water supplies for decision making to maintain the water supply according to demand strategy. Smarter water management, new technologies and improvement of water management system, is essential to solve the problem of water efficiency and availability. In this paper, the irrigation efficiencies according to water delivery performance indicator were measured with automatic water gauge at irrigation canals, and calculated from spatial and temporal distribution of water supply for the lack of planning in water delivery. The analysis of results are obtain an insight into possible improvement methods to develop canal water management policies that enable irrigation planners to optimally manage scarce available water resources.

Agricultural Drought Risk Assessment using Reservoir Drought Index

Drought risk assessment is usually performed qualitatively and quantitatively depending on the definition a drought. The meteorological drought indices have a limit of not being able to consider the hydrological components such as evapotranspiration, soil moisture and runoff, because it does not consider the water demand in paddies and water supply in reservoirs. Agricultural drought was defined as the reservoir storage shortage state that cannot satisfy water requirement from the paddy fields. The objectives of this study were to suggest improved agricultural drought risk assessment in order to evaluate of regional drought vulnerability and severity studied by using Reservoir Drought Index (RDI). The RDI is designed to simulate daily water balance between available water from agricultural reservoir and water requirement in paddies and is calculated with a frequency analysis of monthly water deficit based on water demand and water supply condition. The results indicated that RDI can be used to assess regional drought risk in agricultural perspective by comparing with the historical records of drought in 2012. It can be concluded that the RDI obtained good performance to reflect the historical drought events for both spatially and temporally. In addition, RDI is expected to contribute to determine the exact situation on the current drought condition for evaluating regional drought risk and to assist the effective drought-related decision making.

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.

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) application for irrigation facilities management based on Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)

A wireless sensor network application for irrigation facilities management is proposed.A real-time information management using ICTs is based on RFID and QR codes.A WSN system was applied to a pilot site for irrigation canals and facilities.We explain the design, installation, and evaluation of an integrated WSN system. Irrigation facilities that supply agricultural water are distributed at low density across areas with water demand and require efficient operation and maintenance. Traditional manual irrigation facilities management faces critical limitations, such as delays/losses resulting from data handling errors, and facility misidentification. Therefore, an information system for irrigation facilities management could be more efficient if it includes a wireless sensor network (WSN) that uses information and communication technologies (ICTs). We propose a wireless sensor network application for irrigation facilities management based on radio frequency identification (RFID) and quick response (QR) codes. The system was installed in a pilot site in the I-dong irrigation districts in Gyeonggi, South Korea, and was determined to be beneficial for the inspection of agricultural irrigation facilities in the irrigation districts. Real-time information downloading, collecting field data, and updating the condition of the irrigation facilities in terms of operational conditions and maintenance requirements can improve management. The operation results demonstrated the applicability of the ICTs and WSN to agricultural water management and that it provided good portability, recognition, and information gathering abilities in the field.

Estimating Vulnerable Duration for Irrigation with Agricultural Water Supply and Demand during Residual Periods

For optimal reservoir operation and management, there are essential elements including water supply in agricultural reservoir and demand in irrigation district. To estimate agricultural water demand and supply, many factors such as weather, crops, soil, growing conditions cultivation method and the watershed/irrigation area should be considered, however, there are occurred water supply impossible duration under the influence of the variability and uncertainty of meteorological and hydrological phenomenon. Focusing on agricultural reservoir, amount and tendency of agricultural water supply and demand shows seasonally/regionally different patterns. Through the analysis of deviation and changes in the timing of the two elements, duration in excess of water supply can be identified quantitatively. Here, we introduce an approach to assessment of irrigation vulnerable duration for effective management of agricultural reservoir using time dependent change analysis of residual water supply and irrigation water requirements. Irrigation vulnerable duration has been determined through the comparison of water supply in agricultural reservoir and demand in irrigation district based on the water budget analysis, therefore can be used as an improved and basis data for the effective and intensive water management.

Analysis of Soil Moisture Recession Characteristics in Conifer Forest

Forest area covers 64 % of the national land of Korea and the forest plays a pivotal role in the hydrological process such as flood, drought, runoff, infiltration, evapotranspiration, etc. In this study, soil moisture monitoring for conifer forest in experimental forest of Seoul National University has been conducted using FDR (Frequency Domain Reflection) for 6 different soil layers, 10, 20, 30, 60, 90 and 120 cm during 2009~2010, and precipitation data was collected from nearby AWS (Automatic Weather Station). Soil moisture monitoring data were used to estimate soil moisture recession constant (SMRC) for analyzing soil moisture recession characteristics. From the results, empirical soil moisture recession equations were estimated and validated to determine the feasibility of the result, and soil moisture contents of measured and calculated showed a similar tendency from April to November. Thus, the results can be applied for soil moisture estimation and provided the basic knowledge in forest soil moisture consumption. Nevertheless, this approach demonstrated applicability limitations during winter and early spring season due to freezing and melting of snow and ice causing peculiar change of soil moisture contents.