Study on Temporal and Spatial Characteristics of Summertime Precipitation over Korean Peninsula

Abstract This study investigated the temporal and spatial characteristics of summertime (June-August) precipitation over Korean peninsula, using Korea Meteorological Administra-tion (KMA)ís Automated Synoptic Observing System (ASOS) data for the period of 1973-2010 and Automatic Weather System (AWS) data for the period of 1998-2010.The authors looked through climatological features of the summertime precipitation, then examined the degree of locality of the precipitation, and probable precipitation amount and its return period of 100 years (i.e., an extreme precipitation event). The amount of monthly total precipitation showed increasing trends for all the summer months during the investigated 38-year period. In particular, the increasing trends were more significant for the months of July and August. The increasing trend of July was seen to be more attributable to the increase of precipitation inten-sity than that of frequency, while the increasing trend of August was seen to be played more importantly by the increase of the precipitation frequency. The e-folding distance, which is cal-culated using the correlation of the precipitation at the reference station with those at all other stations, revealed that it is August that has the highest locality of hourly precipitation, indicat-ing higher potential of localized heavy rainfall in August compared to other summer months