by
Ramazan Özgür İridere | Dec 14, 2023
Project Title: Coseismic Landslides and Cascading Hazards of the February 6, 2023 Turkiye Earthquake: Preliminary Database Development and Modeling Analysis
Project Type: NASA
The project prepared by an international team led by Prof. Dr. Erkan İstanbulluoğlu from the University of Washington and including Assoc. Prof. Dr. M. Cüneyd Demirel, a faculty member of the Department of Civil Engineering at Istanbul Technical University, and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Tolga Görüm, a faculty member of the Department of Solid Earth Sciences at the Eurasia Earth Sciences Institute, was accepted and granted support by NASA.
Within the scope of the project, it is aimed to better understand the landslides and cascading hazards triggered by the Kahramanmaraş-centered earthquakes that occurred on February 6, 2023. In this context, it is aimed to develop a preliminary database and model analyses in line with the multidisciplinary studies to be carried out by the project team. In addition to the landslides triggered by the earthquake in the study region, different parameters such as soil moisture, snow depth, air temperature, precipitation, runoff are taken into consideration in order to better understand the flood events that occur as a result of the rainfall after the earthquake. In this context, the pre-earthquake and post-earthquake conditions of the study area will be examined with the help of hydrological modeling by taking into account the discharge data from the State Hydraulic Works (DSİ) stations and precipitation data from the General Directorate of Meteorology (MGM) stations, as well as ERA5-Land satellite data, and the effect of seismic movements on landslides during the earthquake and the hydrological history of the flooding that occurred after the earthquake will be investigated. Assoc. Prof. Dr. M. Cüneyd Demirel and PhD student Oğuzhan Murat Halat contribute to the project with a physically-based hydrologic model. The satellite-based calibration methods we developed in our article (DOI: 10.22541/essoar.169290547.74870875/v1), which was accepted in December in Water Resources Research (WRR), one of the most distinguished journals in the field of hydrology, and the SPAEF objective function, also developed by Assoc. Prof. Dr. M. Cüneyd Demirel, will be used in the research process in this project.
With a budget of 120 thousand dollars, NASA support for the project will continue between May 27, 2023 and May 27, 2024. Project participants include Istanbul Technical University, Karadeniz Technical University, AFAD, University of Washington, University of Maryland Baltimore County, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Washington State Geological Survey and University of Twente.