Modeling bioclimate comfort status of Turkiye within the framework of climate change

This study aimed to model Turkey's current and future bioclimatic comfort zones, tourism comfort zones, and identify regions that under heat stress, with the support of remotely sensed data, under the climate change. The Physiological Equivalent Temperature (PET) index, which evaluates the physiological conditions of the thermal environment, based on the human energy balance, was used to determine the bioclimatic comfort status. The data set used to determine the current bioclimatic comfort of Turkey, included average temperature (°C), relative humidity (%) and wind (m/s) data recorded from 2584 meteorology stations at 14:00 and daily long years (1998-2019) and Cloudiness (octas) data derived from MODIS satellite data. Air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and solar radiation data of SSP2-4.5 and SSP5-8.5 scenarios for 2050 from CMIP6 model forecast were used for future modeling. Meteorological data were interpolated at 1 km spatial resolution to make compatible with the MODIS satellite image. PET values were derived using RayMan model together with the data processed for 997.197 points, represent one point per square kilometer, across the country. Thus, this enabled to prevent output losses caused by missing data in meteorological stations. The Tourism Climate Index (TCI) developed by Mieczkowski (1985) was used to determine the climate zones suitable for tourism. Heat stress was produced by the discomfort index (DI) developed by Thom (1959) using MODIS land surface temperature (LST) data. As a result of the study, it was revealed that the provinces of Kocaeli, Yalova, Çanakkale, Zonguldak and Istanbul spent 45 weeks of the year in comfort, while the provinces of Erzurum, Batman, Şırnak, Mardin and Ardahan have bioclimatic comfort for only 38 weeks throughout the year. It is predicted that PET values will increase by 1.3 –2.6 °C in the near future. It has been determined that there is an acceptable comfort situation between February and November In terms of tourism comfort. The results of the study were made available to beneficiaries on a web-based system.