The effect of climate change on potantial evaporation from the water surface

Lately, climate change and water problems are among the most significant environmental issues. In the near future climate change will have a significant impact on water resources. The impact of climate change on water resources is one of the most important issues on the agenda. In this context, the impact of climate change on water resources should be known and necessary precautions must be taken for the future. In this perspective, it is important to estimate the evaporation losses, which are one of the important parts of the hydrological cycle, for the future. Due to the difficulty in measuring evaporation from water surfaces experimentally, different methods have been developed and proposed for its determination. In this study one of the important dams in Turkey, the Ataturk Dam reservoir is considered, and different methods are used to estimate the evaporation for the present day, the near future i.e. 2045-2055 and in the distant future i.e. 2085-2095, the state of evaporation for these periods are then compared to the present day estimation of evaporation. The evaporation methods used in this study to estimate the evaporation are then compared with the Penman-Monteith method, which is considered as a standard. It is thus observed that the evaporation from the reservoir of Ataturk Dam will increase between 10% and 15% for the near future period i.e. 2045-2055 while for the distant future period i.e. 2085-2095 an increase of 20% - 25% is recorded. Keywords: Climate Change, Open water surface, evaporation, Ataturk Dam, Reservoir