Comprehensive Climatological Drought Projection over South Korea under Climate Change

Abstract

It is essential to predict drought properties precisely using robust drought measures representing anomaly of all possible drought-driving factors. This study quantified the comprehensive multi-variables based future drought projection, which is lacking in precedent studies carried out for South Korea. The analyses were based on historical (1985-2014) and future (2015-2100) climatic data generated from regional climate model (HadGEM-3R) under the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP 8.5) scenario. The overall results indicated that winter season showed more signposts of severe drought followed by spring. The temporal analyses resulted an increase in numbers of drought events from the historical segment (1985-2014) to first segment (2015-2040) of future followed by a slightly decrease from the first segment to the second segment (2041-2070) and then again increase afterward. Furthermore, it was found that most of the projected annual droughts would occur in 2035 to 2060, and 2078 to 2100. © 2016 The Authors.