Rising Seas in Turkey


Turkey's coastal provinces make up roughly 30% of the country's entire land.  And, about 30 million residents, out of a total population of 75.6 million, live along the coast.  More people than ever are moving to the world's coasts, increasing the pressure to relax development standards created for safety, such as building too close to the shore.  

Turkey’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (May 2018) estimates that the global sea level will rise an estimated 7 to 23 inches in the next century due to global climate change, global warming and melting of ice sheets. Rising sea levels will result, inundating wetlands and other low-lying lands, eroding beaches, intensify flooding, and increasing salinity of rivers and groundwater tables. 
With so much of the country at risk of flooding due to rising sea levels,Turkey is on it!  Sea level observation stations (tide gauges) in Turkey are deployed and operated for mapping activities and for sea level defense. Sea level observations have been carried out by float operated gauges beginning in 1998. 
Since then, gauges have been replaced with acoustic ones having sounding tubes and the Turkish National Sea Level Monitoring System (TUDES) has been established. Currently, TUDES consists of one data center, with 20 digital and automatic tide gauge stations deployed along the coasts of Turkey.
TUDES is one of the most unique tide gauge networks along the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, in which instantaneous sea level and some meteorological parameters such as temperature, pressure and wind are measured, stored digitally, and transmitted to the data center via automatic systems.
Through the TUDES project, General Command of Mapping aims to; 
  • Determine and improve vertical reference surfaces for heights and depths used in topographic, nautical and aeronautical charts,
  • Connect the vertical data of Anatolia, Thrace, Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and other Turkish islands, 
  • Monitor sea level variations in time and space domain,
  • Find out tidal characteristics and produce accurate tide information, 
  • Provide sea level data for natural hazards such as earthquake, tsunami, storm surges, and climate change studies. 
Sea level, atmospheric pressure, air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction are measured with high accuracy at the TUDES tide gauges and stored in dataloggers at intervals of every 15 minutes. Data is collected from the TUDES gauges, and quality control and analysis processes are performed at the data center in Ankara. Sea level and other ancillary data is collected from the TUDES tide gauges.
REFERENCES
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/250083650_Potential_Implications_of_Accelerated_Sea-Level_Rise_for_Turkey
http://www.inderscience.com/info/inarticle.php?artid=87207
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015EGUGA..1710300C
https://www.hgk.msb.gov.tr/english/u-12-turkish-sea-level-monitoring-system--tudes-.html


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