Study on spatial-temporal variations of Meteorological-Agricultural droughts in Turkey

Abstract. In this study, the meteorological drought represented by Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) and agriculture drought represented by Vegetation Condition Index (VCI) are analysed in seven regions over Turkey. VCI calculated using the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data obtained from NOAA AVHRR, SPEI obtained from the SPEI global database with the version (SPEI base v2.5), and Land use/cover obtained from CORINE datasets. The study covers the period from January 1982 to December 2015 due to the availability of NDVI data. The correlation between monthly and seasonal VCI and SPEI (lag months 1, 3, 6, 9, and 12) was investigated in a regional and provincial scale. Monthly correlation found to be the highest in the Central Anatolia, Aegean, Marmara and Mediterranean regions respectively, while other regions have lower and non-homogenous values. One lag time of the VCI with respect to SPEI 12 improves the correlation. The regional correlation showed that, the highest correlation between two parameters is obtained for all the regions with SPEI 12 during summer, then followed by Autumn, and Spring months, the maximum values are recorded for the Central Anatolia (0.656) and Mediterranean (0.625) in Summer, and Aegean (0.643) in Autumn respectively; rather lower correlation values did occur in Marmara (0.515) in Autumn, Eastern Anatolia (0.501), SE Anatolia (0.375) and Black Sea (0.297) regions in Summer. The provincial investigation between seasonal VCI and SPEI indicated that the presence of a positive correlation in general in most of the provinces in all seasons with several exceptions in the Eastern Anatolia, South eastern Anatolia, Black sea, and Marmara. The land cover types with high correlation coefficients are noticed to be covered by forest, agricultural lands, non-irrigable lands and mostly covered by fruits (grape, olive etc.) using CORINE land cover map.