Drought Monitoring and Forecasting across Turkey: A Contemporary Review

Abstract

One of the critical consequences of climate change at both local and regional scales is a change in the patterns of extreme climate events such as droughts. Focusing on the different types of droughts, their quantifying indices, associated indicators, and sources of data (remote sensing (RS)/in situ measurements), this article reviewed the recent studies (from 2010 to 2022) that have explored drought features in Turkey. To this end, a total of 71 articles were selected from the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases. The selected papers were clustered into two categories: (i) drought monitoring studies and (ii) drought forecasting articles. Then, the representative papers were reviewed in detail regarding the implemented indices, models (techniques), case study area, and source of the indicators used to derive drought indices. The review results showed that most of the studies aimed at meteorological drought monitoring and forecasting. An increasing trend was also observed in the use of machine learning for short-term meteorological and hydrological drought prediction. On the other hand, the emerging RS technology and satellite-driven indicators were rarely used in the country. The review showed that there is room for more research on agricultural and hydrological drought monitoring, forecasting, and pattern detection in Turkey.

Prediction of Water Level in Lakes by RNN-Based Deep Learning Algorithms to Preserve Sustainability in Changing Climate and Relationship to Microcystin

“…It is a 16 km (east-west) and 5 km (north-south) long tectonic fresh water source that provides the drinking water needs of both cities. It has a surface area of 46 km 2 and a reasonable depth of 30 m. It has a volume of about 1.3 billion m 3 . The greatest depth of the lake basin is 54 m, and its catchment area is 250 km 2 [36].…”

“…Turkey experiences frequent droughts that significantly reduce surface and groundwater resources, including wetlands and lakes [3,4]. Drought conditions affect standing water bodies when there is a reduction in surface runoff and in stream inputs.…”

An appraisal of the local‐scale spatio‐temporal variations of drought based on the integrated GRACE/GRACE‐FO observations and fine‐resolution FLDAS model

“…As one of the world's climatic variability hotspots with a dominating arid to semi‐arid climate, Türkiye is overly susceptible to drought risk, in which progressive and dramatic drier seasons at higher levels of global warming seem to be ineluctable (Pekpostalci et al, 2023). The climate change impacts accompanied by the geographic characteristics of the region have rendered the majority of the country, particularly the central, southern, and southeastern regions, prone to water scarcity (Kurnaz, 2014) where agriculture is the main economic sector (Komuscu, 1999).…”

“…For example, according to Dellal and McCarl (2010), up to 15% of the national agricultural production of Türkiye was negatively affected by the extreme drought in 2007, culminating in the loss of welfare of the population. Although drought events over Türkiye have been explored by a myriad of studies (e.g., Khorrami & Gunduz, 2021a; Khorrami & Gündüz, 2022; Kurnaz, 2014; Pekpostalci et al, 2023), no previous study have implemented a downscaled GRACE data integrated assessment procedure. Therefore, the main novelty of the current study is to evaluate the spatiotemporal patterns of drought using downscaled GRACE estimates.…”

“…Although the GRACE data are more suitable for large-scale hydrological applications due to their coarse resolution, recent developments in downscaling techniques make GRACE data suitable to assess the local scale variations in water storage in some studies (e.g., Ali et al, 2021;Arshad et al, 2022;Gerdener et al, 2020;Gyawali et al, 2022;Jyolsna et al, 2021;Khorrami et al, 2021;Khorrami, Pirasteh, Ali, et al, 2023;Seo & Lee, 2019;Yin et al, 2022). However, the majority of the downscaling As one of the world's climatic variability hotspots with a dominating arid to semi-arid climate, Türkiye is overly susceptible to drought risk, in which progressive and dramatic drier seasons at higher levels of global warming seem to be ineluctable (Pekpostalci et al, 2023).…”