Drought is a non-negligible disaster of nature and it is mainly caused by rainfall shortage for a long time though there are many definitions of drought. 'Standard Precipitation Index' (SPI) that is widely used to express the level of meteorological drought intensity has a limit of not being able to consider the hydrological changes such as rainfall and evapotranspiration caused by climate change, because it does not consider the temperature-related variables other than the precipitation. Recently, however, 'Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index' (SPEI), a drought index of new concept which is similar to SPI but can reflect the effect of temperature variability as well as the rainfall change caused by climate variation, was developed. In this study, the changes of drought occurrence in South Korea were analyzed by applying SPEI for meteorological data (1973～2011) of 60 climate observatories under Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA). As the result of application, both of SPI and SPEI showed the trend of deepening drought in spring and winter and mitigating drought in summer for the entire nation, with SPI showing greater drought intensity than SPI. Also, SPI and SPEI with 12 months of duration showed that severe droughts with low frequency of around 6 years are generally being repeated.

As an attempt to explore the impact of droughts which may be worse by the climate change, the change in the water balance of the Han-river basin is analyzed. To accomplish it, we suggest a procedure consisting of three successive sub-procedures: daily rainfall generation for 70 years by the RegCM3 RCM (27 × 27 km) with the A2 scenario, daily discharge simulations by SLURP using the generated daily rainfall data, and monthly water balance analysis by K-WEAP (Korean Water Evaluation and Planning System) based on the SLURP simulation. Since significant uncertainty is involved in forecasting the future water consumption and water yields, we assumed three water consumption scenarios and fifty water yields scenarios. Three water consumption scenarios are, namely, "LOW", "MEDIUM", and "HIGH" according to the expected amount of water consumption. The fifty daily discharges are obtained from the SLURP simulations during the drought period. Finally, water balance analysis is performed by K-WEAP based on 150 combinations from three water consumption scenarios and the fifty daily discharges. Analysis of water scarcity in small basins of the Han River basin showed concentration of water scarcity in some small basins. It was also found that water scarcity would increase in all small basins of the Han River basin.

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