Abstract:

Climate change is defined as one of the most serious environmental threats facing global ecosystems. Changes in seawater temperatures are at the top of these threats. Increases or decreases in seawater temperatures have the potential to significantly disrupt the ecological balance in the seas. The aim of this study is to investigate the possible effects of climate change on the sea water temperatures of the İnebolu and Sinop meteorological observation stations located on the Central Black Sea coast. Within the scope of the study, the SSP2-4.5 (optimistic) and SSP5-8.5 (pessimistic) scenario outputs of four general circulation models (GCMs) selected from the CMIP6 archive were downscaled to regional scale by artificial neural networks statistical downscaling method and future period (2023-2052) sea water temperature values were obtained for both stations. At the İnebolu station, the monthly average sea water temperatures may vary between –0.24 and 1.66 °C according to the optimistic scenario and between –0.30 and 1.71 °C according to the pessimistic scenario in the future period. Annual average sea water temperatures are predicted to increase by 0.67 and 0.56 °C according to these scenarios, respectively. At the Sinop station, monthly average sea water temperatures are predicted to change between 0.18 and 1.95 °C according to the optimistic scenario outputs and between 0.34 and 1.85 °C according to the pessimistic scenario. For the annual average sea water temperature values, the optimistic and pessimistic scenarios

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