Investigating the climate change in Turkey by trend analysis techniques

Climate change is defined as the change in climate observed over a time period and it is referred directly or indirectly to human activity. It is believed to be the most serious threat to global environment with its potential impacts such as global warming, sea level rise and increased extreme weather events. The reasons of climate change can be mainly divided into two main components which are greenhouse gases and human factors. Increase in the greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations in the atmosphere is the main cause of the climate change in the world. The other important factor for climate change is humans. Humans are changing the climate of the world by burning of fossil fuels, urbanization, deforestation, agriculture, and industrial processes. In this work, the components of climate change in Turkey were deeply investigated. Firstly, how climate changed over the past 50 years was analyzed in terms of average annual temperature, precipitation, evaporation, moisture, sea water temperatures, soil temperature and number of snowy days in Turkey. Then, these data is analyzed by statistical techniques and their trends are evaluated. Moreover, Van Lake basin is taken as a case study and variations in temperature, precipitation, flow and lake level parameters are investigated. Again, trends of those variables are evaluated. In addition to this, correlations of those parameters are obtained and their effects on each other are explained. It is observed that while temperature is increasing, precipitation, moisture and number of snowy days are decreasing in Turkey. Hence, it can be said that global warming shows its reflections in Turkey as well.