Korea Climate Change Trend with the Changing of Precipitation

Recently, according to climate change, annual total precipitation in most regions of South Korea, including Busan, has increased slightly, while average hourly precipitation intensity has increased significantly and morning shift phenomenon has pronounced, which is an increase in the frequency and intensity of hourly precipitation during the morning. Using the hourly precipitation data collected over 40 years (1970-2009) from 26 weather stations in the Korean peninsula, we classified six types based on the diurnal variation of precipitation pattern for each weather station and the deepening of morning shift phenomenon and climate change is analyzed for each type.

As a result, the distribution of Aa type, characterized by a more than 55 percent of daily precipitation is focused on the morning (morning shift phenomenon) and the precipitation rate trend line of the morning is greater than 1.5 times of that of the afternoon, revealed to be concentrated over the southern coast of Korea, including Jeju-island and these regions coincide with the regions that are already classified as a subtropical climate region in the 1970’s. Also, the distribution of Ab type, which has the morning shift phenomenon but the precipitation rate trend line of the morning is less than 1.5 times of that of the afternoon, revealed to be located over the western coast of Korea. Therefore, we could analyze that the western coast of Korea take priority to become a subtropical climate and the degree of climate change could be estimated from these methods.

Keywords : climate change, the morning shift phenomenon, the precipitation rate trend line, a subtropical climate, degree of climate change

Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the Korea Meteorological Administration Research and Development Program under Grant KMIPA 2015-8070.