Abstract

The climatic impacts have been the environmental constraints with soil characteristics to achieve self sufficiency of food production in Korea. In this paper, the distribution and appearance of impacts and the changes in climatological status due to recent trend of early transplanting of rice are widely discussed to derive some countermeasures against the impacts, being focussed on cultural A long term analysis of the climatic impact appearances of the last 74 years showed that drought, strong wind, flood, cold spell and frost were the major impacts. Before 1970's, the drought damage was the greatest among the climatic impacts; however, the expansion and improvement of irrigation and drainage system markedly decreased the damage of drought and heavy rain. The appearance of cold damage became more frequent than before due to introduction of early transplanting for more thermophilic new varieties. Tongillines which were from Indica and Japonica crosses throw more attention to cold damage for high yields to secure high temperature in heading and ripening stages and lead weakness to cold and drought damage in early growth stage after transplanting. The plants became subject to heavy rain in ripening stage also. For the countermeasures against cold damage, the rational distribution of adequate varieties according to the regional climatic conditions and planting schedule should be imposed on the cultivation. A detoured water way to increase water temperature might be suggestable in the early growth stage. Heavy application of phosphate to boost rooting and tillering also would be a nutritional control method. In the heading and ripening stages, foliar application of phosphate and additional fertilization of silicate might be considerable way of nutritional control. Since the amount of solar radiation and air temperature in dry years were high, healthy plants for high yield could be obtained; therefere, the expansion of irrigation system and development of subsurface water should be performed as one of the national development projects. To minimize the damage of strong wind and rainfall, the rational distribution of varieties with different growing periods in the area where the damage occurred habitualy should be considered with installation of wind breaks. Not only vertical windbreaks but also a horizontal wind break using a net might be a possible way to decrease the white heads in rice field by dry wind. Finally, to establish the integrated countermeasures against the climatic impacts, the detailed interpretation on the regional climatic conditions should be conducted to understand distribution and frequency of the impacts. The expansion of observation net work for agricultural meteorology and development of analysis techniques for meteorological data must be conducted in future together with the development of the new cultural techniques.

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