A Field-Specific Agro-Meteorological Early Warning Services System in Korea.

Objective of agro-meteorological early warning services system is to develop a risk management solution for individual farms threatened by the climate change and variability. This service produces weather risk indices tailored to the crop species and phenology by using site-specific weather forecasts and analysis derived from digital products of the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA). If the risk is high enough to cause any damage to the crops, agro-meteorological warnings or watches are delivered to the grower's mobile phones with relevant countermeasures to help project their crops against the potential damage. The products are based on core techniques such as scaling down of weather information to a field level and the crop specific risk assessment. Core techniques such as scaling down of weather data to individual farm level and the crop specific risk assessment for operational service were developed and integrated into a web service system (http://www.agmet.kr, in Korean). This service provides volunteer farmers with face-to-face weather data and disaster warning with relevant countermeasures. It is employed and implemented in a rural catchment of 1000 km2 with diverse agricultural activities and 530 volunteer farmers are participating in this project to get the user-specific weather information from and to feed their evaluations back to National Institute of Agricultural Science (NAS) in 2015. Likelihood of a disaster is evaluated by the relative position of current risk on the standardized normal distribution from climatologically normal year prepared 840 catchments in Korea. A validation study has begun with a 4-year (from 2014 through 2017) plan for implementing an operational service in Seomjin River Basin, which accommodates over 60,000 farms and orchards. Diverse experience obtained through this study will certainly be useful in planning and developing the nation-wide disaster early warning system for agricultural sector exposed to the climate and weather extremes under climate change and climate variability. This service system will be extended nation-wide since 2018.