Annual and seasonal trend patterns of climate change in North Cyprus

Download
2013-3
Seyhun, Rahme
In order to meet water needs for the present and future to sustain life, applying sustainable water resources management is vital. Changes in temperature and precipitation regimes affect the agriculture and ecosystem. Therefore, investigation of the changes in the spatial and temporal rainfall and temperature patterns is important for sustainable water resources management. The meteorological data used in this study was obtained from North Cyprus Meteorological Office. Annual, seasonal, and monthly rainfall variables are studied in order to examine the changes in precipitation regimes, while average and maximum of monthly maximum, average and minimum of monthly minimum, average of monthly average, and monthly diurnal temperature variables are used for the study of temperature regimes. Nonparametric Mann-Kendall rank correlation, Seasonal Kendall, Sen‟s T, and Seasonal Sen‟s T tests are employed to identify the existence of linear trend in rainfall and temperature variables. 10% significance level is used to extract significant trends. After filling in missing data and testing for homogeneity of time series for the period of 1978-2011, these trend tests are applied to the observed rainfall data from 20 rain-gauge stations, and temperature data from 8 temperature-gauge stations, all located in the northern part of the island. Inverse Distance Method has been used to fill in the missing values in the temperature and precipitation data. Furthermore, Standard Normal Homogeneity Test (SNHT) is employed in this study to determine the non-homogeneities in the data. The results show that there is no nonhomogeneity in the records of both temperature and precipitation variables. Trend tests indicate that there is no trend in the annual rainfall. However, upward trends in September rainfall and downward trends in March rainfall have been observed in most of the stations. This indicates that there is a shift in monthly rainfall regime. On the other hand, there are strong increasing trends in temperature variables, except downward trends in monthly diurnal temperatures. These upward trends have been observed mostly in summer months and almost in all stations. Diurnal temperature range indicates the differential value between average maximum and minimum temperatures. Since trends in average minimum temperatures have increased at a faster rate, decreasing trends have been observed in Diurnal temperature ranges in most of the stations. Trends in more extreme temperature variables, minimum of monthly minimum and maximum of monthly maximum temperatures, also increased during the period mostly in summer season, although the trends are not strong as the trends in the other temperature variables.

Suggestions

Drought analysis of Konya Closed Basin with the use of TMPA satellite-based precipitation data
Yılmaz, Meriç (2017-01-01)
Investigation of drought that has heavy sociological and economical costs to countries is very important to alleviate its adverse impacts and to take the necessary precautions. Konya Closed Basin, which has critical role in terms of agricultural yield for our country, is one of the regions where the impact of the drought is felt the most due to its semi-arid climate. For this reason, in this study, severity, duration, and impact area of drought is analyzed over Konya Closed Basin between 1998 and 2015. In t...
Potential Impacts of Climate Change on Turkish Water Resources: A Review
Yılmaz, Koray Kamil; Yazıcıgil, Hasan (2010-09-04)
Water resources are mainly controlled by the climate conditions. Global warming will therefore have evolving impacts on water resources and poses important challenges for sustainable development. Studies are rapidly emerging with focus on potential implications of climate change on Turkish water resources. These studies can be grouped into two major fields: (1) Studies investigating the degree of climate change reflected in the past observed hydro-meteorological records, and (2) studies investigating potent...
Predictability of monthly streamflow discharge using remote sensing precipitation data by data driven models
Çolak, Mehmet Ali; Yılmaz, Mustafa Tuğrul; Department of Civil Engineering (2017)
Predictability of stream flow has been the focus of many studies involving water resources management and hydroelectric energy production. Many hydrologic models have been developed to predict future and current streamflow at various time lags and locations. However, these physically-based models require reanalyzed future data sets (particularly precipitation forcing data) to predict future streamflow. Alternatively, data driven models can also provide predictions without the need of future projections by r...
Temporal evaluation of snow depletion curves derived for upper euphrates basin and applications of snowmelt runoff model (srm)
Marım, Gökhan; Şorman, Ali Ünal; Department of Geodetic and Geographical Information Technologies (2008)
Water is becoming very important issue day by day with descending usable water and energy resources. In the aspect of water resources management, especially for the optimum reservoir management, predicting runoff for large reservoirs by applying hydrologic model is a recent and crucial topic. The most important model input and predictor parameters to estimate runoff for the mountainous regions are to be distribution of rainfall; temperature and snow cover area, (SCA). It is seen that many predictor variable...
Assessing the impacts of climate change on sustainable management of coastal aquifers
UNSAL, Burcu; Yagbasan, Ozlem; Yazıcıgil, Hasan (2014-09-01)
Water is a vital resource for the survival of not only human population, but also almost all ecosystems. Constituting 30 % of all freshwater, groundwater is the main source of available freshwater. Coastal aquifers, which serve as the major freshwater source for densely populated zones, are of vital importance and quite vulnerable to climate change. This paper examines the significant consequences of climate change, decreasing recharge rates, sea-level rise and increasing freshwater demand on the sustainabl...
Citation Formats
R. Seyhun, “Annual and seasonal trend patterns of climate change in North Cyprus,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2013.