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Drought risks in Turkey - Istanbul water reservoir levels case study.
27 May 2021
My project concerns how drought risks in Turkey are altering as climate change moves forward and understanding how water resources can be affected by a range of factors is an important element of managing water resources sustainably in the future.
Fig 1. Water reservoir levels (%) from 2005 to 2020 in Istanbul
I鈥檓 a final-year Ph.D. student at 皇家华人. My project concerns how drought risks in Turkey are altering as climate change moves forward and understanding how water resources can be affected by a range of factors is an important element of managing water resources sustainably in the future. In this paper, how water reservoir levels which are strongly linked to weather patterns have changed over the 15 years, and some suggestions for saving water under drought conditions were evaluated. The way of visualizing water reservoir levels which I used in the poster for the October 2020 UCL SDGs conference, Beyond Boundaries was selected as a cover photo of the journal (Fig 1).
Although the journal accepts the English manuscripts, in order to inform the public about water security data, the paper was written in Turkish. Prof Toros, one of the authors, gave a talk about the water situation mentioned in this paper on the news. It is seen that the years of 2007, 2008, 2014, and 2020 were the driest years and that monthly water reservoir level averages in 2011, 2013, 2019, and 2020 did not increase again throughout the year. It is also seen that the recovery of reservoir levels at the beginning of the year was delayed up to two months. In addition, it is calculated that daily 150 million litres of water could be saved per day in 陌stanbul by just turning off the taps while soaping hands.
Another case study in Ankara, the capital of Turkey, has been submitted to the journal and currently is under review. It is found that water consumption in Ankara increased during the period of the first Covid-19 lockdown in 2020. Another exciting part of my project is to analyse unseen meteorological data dating back to the Ottoman Empire (1896 to 1917), which will show us how the weather changed in Istanbul over the century.
Links:
- Ferhat Yilmaz's research profile
Temporal Analysis of Istanbul Dam Occupancy Rates and Solution Proposals. by Ferhat YILMAZ - 陌smail ULUSOY Huseyin TOROS.
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