On Mapping Growing Degree-Days (GDD) from Monthly Digital Climatic Surfaces for South Korea
2008
Kim, J.H. (Kyung Hee University, Yongin, Republic of Korea) | Yun, J.I. (Kyung Hee University, Yongin, Republic of Korea), E-mail: [email protected]
The concept of growing degree-days (GDD) is widely accepted as a tool to relate plant growth, development, and maturity to temperature. Information on GDD can be used to predict the yield and quality of several crops, flowering date of fruit trees, and insect activity related to agriculture and forestry. When GDD is expressed on a spatial basis, it helps identify the limits of geographical areas suitable for production of various crops and to evaluate areas agriculturally suitable for new or nonnative plants. The national digital climate maps (NDCM, the fine resolution, gridded climate data for climatological normal years) are not provided on a daily basis but on a monthly basis, prohibiting GDD calculation. We applied a widely used GDD estimation method based on monthly data to a part of the NDCM (for Hapcheon County) to produce the spatial GDD data for each month with three different base temperatures (0, 5, and 10℃). Synthetically generated daily temperatures from the NCDM were used to calculate GDD over the same area and the deviations were calculated for each month. The monthly-data based GDD was close to the reference GDD using daily data only for the case of base temperature 0℃. There was a consistent overestimation in GDD with other base temperatures. Hence, we estimated spatial GDD with base temperature 0℃ over the entire nation for the current (1971-2000, observed) and three future (2011-2040, 2041-2070, and 2071-2100, predicted) climatological normal years. Our estimation indicates that the annual GDD in Korea may increase by 38% in 2071-2100 compared with that in 1971-2000.
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