TY - JOUR A1 - Koc, Gamze A1 - Thieken, Annegret T1 - The relevance of flood hazards and impacts in Turkey BT - what can be learned from different disaster loss databases? JF - Natural hazards : journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards N2 - Turkey has been severely affected by many natural hazards, in particular earthquakes and floods. Especially over the last two decades, these natural hazards have caused enormous human and economic damage. Although there is a large body of literature on earthquake hazards and risks in Turkey, comparatively little is known about flood hazards and risks. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the severity of flooding in comparison with other natural hazards in Turkey and to analyse the flood patterns by providing an overview of the temporal and spatial distribution of flood losses. These will act as a metric for the societal and economic impacts of flood hazards in Turkey. For this purpose, Turkey Disaster Database (TABB) was used for the years 1960-2014. As input for more detailed event analyses, the most severe flood events in Turkey for the same time interval will also be retrieved. Sufficiency of the TABB database to achieve the main aim of the study in terms of data quality and accuracy was also discussed. The TABB database was analysed and reviewed through comparison, mainly with the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT), the Global Active Archive of Large Flood Events-Dartmouth Flood Observatory database, news archives and the scientific literature, with a focus on listing the most severe flood event. The comparative review of these data sources reveals big mismatches in the flood data, i.e. the reported number of events, number of affected people and economic loss all differ dramatically. Owing to the fact that the TABB is the only disaster loss database for Turkey, it is important to explore the reasons for the mismatches between TABB and the other sources with regard to aspects of accuracy and data quality. Therefore, biases and fallacies in the TABB loss data are also discussed. The comparative TABB database analyses show that large mismatches between global and national databases can occur. Current global and national databases for monitoring losses from national hazards suffer from a number of limitations, which in turn could lead to misinterpretations of the loss data. Since loss data collection is gaining more and more attention, e.g. in the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, this study offers a framework for developing guidelines for the Turkey Disaster Database (TABB), implications on how to standardize national loss databases and implement across the other hazard events in Turkey. KW - Historic natural hazards KW - Floods KW - Disaster loss databases KW - Flood impacts KW - Turkey Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-017-3134-6 SN - 0921-030X SN - 1573-0840 VL - 91 IS - 1 SP - 375 EP - 408 PB - Springer CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Koc, Gamze A1 - Petrow, Theresia A1 - Thieken, Annegret T1 - Analysis of the most severe flood events in Turkey (1960-2014) BT - which triggering mechanisms and aggravating pathways can be identified? JF - Water / Molecular Diversity Preservation International (MDPI) N2 - The most severe flood events in Turkey were determined for the period 1960-2014 by considering the number of fatalities, the number of affected people, and the total economic losses as indicators. The potential triggering mechanisms (i.e., atmospheric circulations and precipitation amounts) and aggravating pathways (i.e., topographic features, catchment size, land use types, and soil properties) of these 25 events were analyzed. On this basis, a new approach was developed to identify the main influencing factor per event and to provide additional information for determining the dominant flood occurrence pathways for severe floods. The events were then classified through hierarchical cluster analysis. As a result, six different clusters were found and characterized. Cluster 1 comprised flood events that were mainly influenced by drainage characteristics (e.g., catchment size and shape); Cluster 2 comprised events aggravated predominantly by urbanization; steep topography was identified to be the dominant factor for Cluster 3; extreme rainfall was determined as the main triggering factor for Cluster 4; saturated soil conditions were found to be the dominant factor for Cluster 5; and orographic effects of mountain ranges characterized Cluster 6. This study determined pathway patterns of the severe floods in Turkey with regard to their main causal or aggravating mechanisms. Accordingly, geomorphological properties are of major importance in large catchments in eastern and northeastern Anatolia. In addition, in small catchments, the share of urbanized area seems to be an important factor for the extent of flood impacts. This paper presents an outcome that could be used for future urban planning and flood risk prevention studies to understand the flood mechanisms in different regions of Turkey. KW - hierarchical clustering KW - Hess-Brezowsky Grosswetterlagen classification KW - ERA5 KW - flood hazards KW - pathway KW - Turkey Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3390/w12061562 SN - 2073-4441 VL - 12 IS - 6 PB - MDPI CY - Basel ER -