The Ski Climate Index (SCI): fuzzification and a regional climate modeling application for Turkey
- PDF / 10,698,353 Bytes
- 15 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 82 Downloads / 171 Views
SPECIAL ISSUE: CLIMATE, TOURISM AND RECREATION
The Ski Climate Index (SCI): fuzzification and a regional climate modeling application for Turkey Osman Cenk Demiroglu 1
&
Mustafa Tufan Turp 2 & Mehmet Levent Kurnaz 2,3 & Bruno Abegg 4
Received: 15 May 2020 / Revised: 5 August 2020 / Accepted: 7 August 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Climatology has increasingly become an important discipline for understanding tourism and recreation, especially in the era of contemporary climate change. Climate indices, in this respect, have been useful tools to yield the climatic attractiveness of tourism destinations as well as in understanding their altering suitability to various tourism types along with the changing climates. In this study, a major gap for a comprehensive climate index tailored for ski tourism is aimed to be fulfilled. For this purpose, initially the Ski Climate Index (SCI) is specified, based on fuzzy logic and as informed by literature and through extensive co-creation with the ski tourism industry experts, and applied to an emerging destination, Turkey, based on regional climate modeling projections. The index is designed as a combination of snow reliability and aesthetics and comfort facets, the latter of which includes sunshine, wind, and thermal comfort conditions. Results show that the Eastern Anatolia region is climatically the most suitable area for future development, taking account of the overriding effects of natural and technical snow reliability. Future research suggestions include the incorporation of more components into the index as well as technical recommendations to improve its application and validation. Keywords Ski Climate Index (SCI) . Fuzzy logic . Ski tourism . Climate change . Regional climate modelling . Turkey
Introduction Climatology has increasingly become an important discipline for understanding tourism and recreation (de Freitas 2003; Martínez-Ibarra and Gómez-Martín 2013), especially in the era of contemporary climate change (de Freitas 2017; Fang et al. 2018). Climate indices (e.g., Mieczkowski 1985; de Freitas et al. 2008; Scott et al. 2016), in this respect, have been useful tools to yield the climatic attractiveness of tourism destinations as well as in understanding their altering suitability to various tourism types along with the changing climates.
* Osman Cenk Demiroglu [email protected] 1
Department of Geography and Arctic Research Centre (ARCUM), Umeå University, 901 87 Umeå, Sweden
2
Center for Climate Change and Policy Studies, Bogazici University, 34342 Istanbul, Turkey
3
Department of Physics, Bogazici University, 34342 Istanbul, Turkey
4
Institute for Systemic Management and Public Governance, University of St. Gallen, 9000 St. Gallen, Switzerland
Climate indices can be briefly defined as indicators that summarize meteorological variables such as temperature, precipitation, humidity, pressure, and wind into categorized, spatiotemporal values that are significant for various physical and human systems. For many decades, tourism has also been
Data Loading...
