ENSO Effect on Black Sea Precipitation

Abstract

El Nino Southern Oscillation is one of the most important oceanic-atmospheric events on the world, which sometimes considerably affects the climates of the countries, i.e. the hydrologic parameters of the regions. Hence, the aim of this study was to determine the possible effects of ENSO events on the precipitation data of the Black Sea Region of Turkey by concerning 23 precipitation-recording stations at the Black Sea Region of Turkey. During the analysis, the synthetic monthly precipitation data corresponding to the El Nino years were generated using Feed Forward Back Propagation Artificial Neural Network model and replaced with the original data. In this way, two precipitation data sets for each station (synthetic and original) were obtained in order to compare their statistical parameters (variance, mean, population, autocorrelation) to find out whether the synthetic and the original data differ from each other or not. Consequently, significant El Nino effect was determined for the precipitation data of Turkey's Black Sea Region which should be taken into consideration for long term drinking water, irrigation, environmental planning, energy purposes, etc. This study can be extended for all the countries surrounding the Black Sea to obtain the regions affected from ENSO more precisely in the subsequent studies.