# Rainfall Standard of Disaster Prediction for Agricultural Droughs in S. Korea
## 2 Materials and Methods  
### Damage from Agricultural Droughts  
In this study, we analyzed the damage from agricultural droughts that occurred from 1965 to 2018, based on the data available from the local governments in South Korea. Drought in South Korea caused damage every 10 years, but there was a lot of interest in the frequent storm and flood damage. Systematic disaster management and drought damage data were established after the revision of \"Enforcement Decree of Countermeasures against Natural Disasters Act\" in June 2018. As for droughts prior to 2018, local governments keep only the damage data for understanding the status. Mostly, local governments collected the data on the periods when droughts occurred and the areas of damage. The damage data of agricultural drought were reported in 1995, 2001, 2009 and 2018, not only in the current year, but also in the past. In addition, from 2010 to 2018, the special report on climate change includes some of the damage data of agricultural drought [41; 42; 43; 44; 45; 46; 47; 48; 49; 50; 51; 52; 53]. Thus, in this study, we reviewed the damage caused by agricultural droughts based on the data available from 17 local governments in South Korea (Figure 1). Figure 1: Study area in South Korea. South Korea has a total of 17 local governments, that is, 1 special city, 1 metropolitan autonomous city, 1 special self-governing province, 6 metropolitan cities and 8 provinces, as outlined in Table 1. South Korea comprises a land area of 106,285.8 km\({}^{2}\) and has a total population of 51.850 million. The country's special and metropolitan cities account for approximately 14% of its total land area and approximately 45.6% of its total population, while 54.4% of its population resides in the provinces, which take up approximately 86% of its total land area. South Korea went through 22 agricultural drought events from 1965 to 2018, which caused damage to rice paddies and fields, where crops failed and wilted. Agricultural drought events caused damage to 1-12 municipalities apart from Ulsan Metropolitan City. Municipalities suffered damage from 1-16 agricultural droughts, excluding Ulsan, as shown in Figure 2. The special and metropolitan cities suffered damage from 0-2 agricultural droughts, while 7-16 devastating agricultural drought events occurred in 8 regional provinces. Eleven droughts, or more than 50% of 22 devastating drought events, occurred in regional provinces: Chungcheongbuk-do(11), Chungcheongnam-do(12), Jeollanam-do(13), Gyeongsangbuk-do(15) and Gyeongsangnam-do(16). Agricultural droughts caused damage on a yearly basis from 1965 to 1982. Then, in 1994, 1995 and 2013-2018, the drought damage affected the agricultural sector. A total area of 1,993,874 ha suffered damage with crops failing and wilting, whilst a large-scale damage affected an area of 100,000 ha in 1967, 1968, 1982 and 1994 (Table 2). From 1965 to 1977, the beginning of the drought was June, and the end was September, the same period was recorded. The reason for this is that the records of past droughts remain only brief records, and the rough period of occurrence and damage area are presented in the 1995 drought record report. 108 regions were affected by the 22 agricultural drought events, where 4-5 regions on average were affected by agricultural droughts. Compared to special and metropolitan cities, Gyeongsangnam-do, Gyeongsangbuk-do, Chungcheongnam-do and Chungcheongbuk-do suffered the greatest damage from agricultural droughts.