Identifying the role of typhoons as drought busters in South Korea based on hidden Markov chain models

Abstract

This study proposed a hidden Markov chain model-based drought analysis (HMM-DA) tool to understand the beginning and ending of meteorological drought and to further characterize typhoon-induced drought busters (TDB) by exploring spatiotemporal drought patterns in South Korea. It was found that typhoons have played a dominant role in ending drought events (EDE) during the typhoon season (July-September) over the last four decades (1974-2013). The percentage of EDEs terminated by TDBs was about 43-90% mainly along coastal regions in South Korea. Furthermore, the TDBs, mainly during summer, have a positive role in managing extreme droughts during the subsequent autumn and spring seasons. The HMM-DA models the temporal dependencies between drought states using Markov chain, consequently capturing the dependencies between droughts and typhoons well, thus, enabling a better performance in modeling spatiotemporal drought attributes compared to traditional methods.