Improving Usage of the Korea Meteorological Administration's Digital Forecasts in Agriculture: 2. Refining the Distribution of Precipitation Amount

The purpose of this study is to find a scheme to scale down the KMA (Korea Meteorological Administration) digital precipitation maps to the grid cell resolution comparable to the rural landscape scale in Korea. As a result, we suggest two steps procedure called RATER (Radar Assisted Topography and Elevation Revision) based on both radar echo data and a mountain precipitation model. In this scheme, the radar reflection intensity at the constant altitude of 1.5 km is applied first to the KMA local analysis and prediction system (KLAPS) 5 km grid cell to obtain 1 km resolution. For the second step the elevation and topography effect on the basis of 270 m digital elevation model (DEM) which represented by the Parameter-elevation Regressions on Independent Slopes Model (PRISM) is applied to the 1 km resolution data to produce the 270 m precipitation map. An experimental watershed with about 50 km 2 catchment area was selected for evaluating this scheme and automated rain gauges were deployed to 13 locations with the various elevations and slope aspects. 19 cases with 1 mm or more precipitation per day were collected from January to May in 2013 and the corresponding KLAPS daily precipitation data were treated with the second step procedure. For the first step, the 24-hour integrated radar echo data were applied to the KLAPS daily precipitation to produce the 1 km resolution data across the watershed. Estimated precipitation at each 1 km grid cell was then regarded as the real world precipitation observed at the center location of the grid cell in order to derive the elevation regressions in the PRISM step. We produced the digital precipitation maps for all the 19 cases by using RATER and extracted the grid cell values corresponding to 13 points from the maps to compare with the observed data. For the cases of 10 mm or more observed precipitation, significant improvement was found in the estimated precipitation at all 13 sites with RATER, compared with the untreated KLAPS 5 km data. Especially, reduction in RMSE was 35% on 30 mm or more observed precipitation.