This study presents meteorological data integrity to improve environmental quality assessment in Yongdam catchment. The study examines both extreme ranges of meteorological data measurements and data reliability which include maximum and minimum temperature, relative humidity, dew point temperature, radiation, heat flux. There were some outliers and missing data from the measurements. In addition, the latent heat flux and sensible heat flux data were not reasonable and evapotranspiration data did not match at some points. The accuracy and consistency of data stored in a database for the study were secured from the data integrity. Users need to take caution when using meteorological data from the Yongdam catchment in the preparation of water resources planning, environmental impact assessment, and natural hazards analysis.

Two main sources of data, meteorological data and land surface characteristics, are essential to effectively run a distributed rainfall-runoff model. The specification and averaging of the land surface characteristics in a suitable way is crucial to obtaining accurate runoff output. Recent advances in remote sensing techniques are often being used to derive better representations of these land surface characteristics. Due to the mismatch in scale between digital land cover maps and numerical grid sizes, issues related to upscaling or downscaling occur regularly. A specific method is typically selected to average and represent the land surface characteristics. This paper examines the amount of flooding by applying the FLO-2D routing model, where vegetation heterogeneity is manipulated using the Manning’s roughness coefficient. Three different upscaling methods, arithmetic, dominant, and aggregation, were tested. To investigate further, the rainfall-runoff model with FLO-2D was facilitated in Yongdam catchment and heavy rainfall events during wet season were selected. The results show aggregation method provides better results, in terms of the amount of peak flow and the relative time taken to achieve it. These rwsults suggest that the aggregation method, which is a reasonably realistic description of area-averaged vegetation nature and characteristics, is more likely to occur in reality.

The real-time monitoring of surface vegetation is essential for the management of droughts, vegetation growth, and water resources. The availability of land cover maps based on remotely collected data makes the monitoring of surface vegetation easier. The vegetation index in an area is likely to be proportional to meteorological elements there such as air temperature and precipitation. This study investigated relationship between vegetation index based on Moderate Resolution Image Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and ground-measured meteorological elements at the Yongdam catchment station. To do this, 16-day averaged data were used. It was found that the vegetation index is well correlated to air temperature but poorly correlated to precipitation. The study provides some intuition and guidelines for the study of the droughts and ecologies in the future.