Impact of land use/land cover (LULC) changes on latent/sensible heat flux and precipitation over Turkiye

Land use and land cover (LULC) changes have some implications on land-atmosphere interactions, surface energy budget, and hydrological cycle. The understanding of LULC changes and their interactions with the environment provide better management of agriculture, forests, and water resources. LULC changes are frequently observed in developing countries such as Turkiye and much research has been conducted in this field. However, few studies investigated the countrywide LULC changes and their interactions with energy fluxes and precipitation. In this paper, LULC changes in Turkiye over the last two decades have been evaluated by utilizing an Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) derived from the Terra satellite. The latent and sensible heat fluxes were obtained from the Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA-2) reanalysis datasets. Precipitation data were acquired from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite. The results showed that EVI has an increasing trend over Turkiye between 2000 and 2021, while climate change-induced desertification, droughts, and forest fires have threatened the vegetative cover in some portions of the country. The latent heat flux has a rising trend due to increasing vegetative cover and irrigated areas. A slight reduction was observed in sensible heat flux, while a sharp increase was witnessed in specific humidity. EVI represented a high positive correlation (R = 0.84) with sensible heat flux and a moderate positive correlation (R = 0.69) with latent heat flux. No significant relation was determined between EVI and precipitation on a monthly basis.