Abstract

In this research, climate classification maps over the Korean Peninsula at 1 km resolution were generated using the satellite-based climatic variables of monthly temperature and precipitation based on machine learning approaches. Random forest (RF), artificial neural networks (ANN), k-nearest neighbor (KNN), logistic regression (LR), and support vector machines (SVM) were used to develop models. Training and validation of these models were conducted using in-situ observations from the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) from 2001 to 2016. The rule of the traditional Köppen-Geiger (K-G) climate classification was used to classify climate regions. The input variables were land surface temperature (LST) of the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), monthly precipitation data from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) 3B43 product, and the Digital Elevation Map (DEM) from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). The overall accuracy (OA) based on validation data from 2001 to 2016 for all models was high over 95%. DEM and minimum winter temperature were two distinct variables over the study area with particularly high relative importance. ANN produced more realistic spatial distribution of the classified climates despite having a slightly lower OA than the others. The accuracy of the models using high altitudinal in-situ data of the Mountain Meteorology Observation System (MMOS) was also assessed. Although the data length of the MMOS data was relatively short (2013 to 2017), it proved that the snowy, dry and cold winter and cool summer class (Dwc) is widely located in the eastern coastal region of South Korea. Temporal shifting of climate was examined through a comparison of climate maps produced by period: from 1950 to 2000, from 1983 to 2000, and from 2001 to 2013. A shrinking trend of snow classes (D) over the Korean Peninsula was clearly observed from the ANN-based climate classification results. Shifting trends of climate with the decrease/increase of snow (D)/temperate (C) classes were clearly shown in the maps produced using the proposed approaches, consistent with the results from the reanalysis data of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC).

Highlights

  • Similarity measures of climate between regions normally presented as climate classes are useful for representing spatial environmental characteristics

  • The dry cold winter and cool summer (Dwc) class showed a significant difference in all input variables when compared to the other classes, especially to Digital Elevation Map (DEM)

  • When compared with the climate classes that have different first characters of the climate classification (i.e., “C” and “D”), minimum land surface temperature (LST) and maximum/minimum precipitation for winter (T_wmin, P_wmax and P_wmin) had differences in value ranges consistent with the K-G formula (T min term)

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Summary

Introduction

Similarity measures of climate between regions normally presented as climate classes are useful for representing spatial environmental characteristics. There have been some approaches to regionalize climate areas according to the similarity of regional climatic characteristics in precipitation and temperature schemes based on rule- [2,3], clustering- [4], and machine learning-based classification [5,6,7]. The spatial resolution of the K-G climate classification map of 5 arc-minutes (~0.083 degrees) [16] is higher than that of the most updated K-T reference of 0.5 degrees [15], and the K-G uses more recent periods of climatic datasets compared to the K-T

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