A comprehensive flood event specification and inventory: 1930–2020 Turkey case study

Flooding is one of the most frequent natural disasters that have significant impact on communities in terms of loss of life, direct and indirect economic losses, and disruption of daily life. Decision makers often depend on flood data inventories to make more informed decisions on the development of flood mitigation plans to protect flood prone communities. A comprehensive inventory that covers multiple aspects of a flood event is critical to identify vulnerable regions, historical trends, and mitigate possible flood impacts. This study proposes an integrated flood data specification to support multi-stakeholder use cases, community-based sustainable domain specific maintenance, and crowdsourced data collection and management. The specification is designed based on comprehensive review of existing global and national repositories, scientific studies and needs and requirements of stakeholders. The specification is designed to include metadata on environmental, economic, and demographic impact, hydraulic, hydrologic, and meteorological features, and detailed location information of a flood event. As a case study, a flood event inventory was compiled for Turkey between 1930 and 2020 using existing national and global data sources and digitized media archives. A total of 2101 flood events with 64 data attributes have been collected over the period of 90 years. An initial statistical analysis of the inventory is also presented for assessment of the seasonal and regional characteristics of flooding in Turkey.