Local knowledge and practices can help people in drought prediction and extreme weather management. The study was carried out to elicit and document local knowledge use in drought prediction and weather extremes management. Focus group discussions were used for this study. The appearance of certain insects, birds, animals and indication of weather are all seen as important signals of change with respect to timing and seasonality of natural phenomena that are well understood in traditional knowledge systems.

This study proposes the new hydrological drought index, Korean Surface Water Supply Index (KSWSI), which overcomes some of the limitations in the calculation of previous SWSI applied in Korea and conducts the probabilistic drought forecasts using KSWSI. In this study, all hydrometeorological variables in the Geum River basin were investigated and appropriate variables were selected as KSWSI components for each sub-basin. And whereby only the normal distributions are applied to all drought components, probability distributions suitable for each KSWSI component were estimated.