Türkiye’de Taşkınların FlooDOT Tabanlı İncelenmesi ve Farklı Veri Kaynaklarının Mekânsal Karşılaştırılması

Floods occur when rivers overflow their banks and rapidly spread into surrounding areas, filling nearby depressions and causing both fatalities and economic losses. In this context, the existence of inventories that include various characteristics of floods is of great importance for understanding both the flood generating mechanisms and the consequences they produce. Global inventories have been found insufficient in providing the necessary databases to understand regional and national-scale flood processes in countries like Türkiye, while data based solely on newspaper archives or official sources have proven inadequate for explaining such processes. To address this gap, the FlooD Inventory Of Türkiye (FlooDOT) was developed. The aim of this study is to introduce the flood inventory created using various data sources for the period between 1928 and 2022 in Türkiye, to reveal the temporal and spatial variations of floods based on this inventory, and to compare the spatial differences among the data sources used. In line with this aim, spatial variations of flood inventories obtained from different sources and the hot and cold spots they form were analysed using the Getis-Ord Gi* statistic. According to the results, a total of 3300 fatal floods were identified, and 9181 flood locations were recorded in the inventory based on 6799 flood events. The temporal distribution of floods in Turkey clearly reveals a quarter-century cycle and a bimodal pattern. Furthermore, the years 1972 and 2001 were identified as outlier years in the temporal distribution of floods. While flood events have been observed across the entire country, the Eastern Black Sea region has been identified as a hot spot in terms of both the number of floods and the frequency of fatal floods. Following the Eastern Black Sea basin, the Sakarya and Euphrates-Tigris basins stand out in terms of both fatal floods and total flood occurrences. Moreover, the comparison of spatial differences between the institutional data from the State Hydraulic Works (DSİ) and other sources, based on analyses using the Getis-Ord Gi** statistic, showed that no cold spots were found in Turkey, and that hot spots varied depending on the data source used. This finding indicates that the FlooDOT inventory provides a reliable spatial representation of flood processes in Türkiye and helps to fill the data gap created by global inventories. Therefore, utilizing records gathered from all available sources during inventory creation processes offers a significant advantage for flood hazard and vulnerability analyses.