Minister claims Turkish technology ahead of ‘inadequate’ NASA

Nuray Babacan – ANKARA

AA Photo

Turkey’s Forestry and Waterworks Minister Veysel Eroğlu slammed NASA’s technology as “inadequate,” and claimed Turkish studies were better at weather forecasts, after the U.S. agency released a study concluding that the ongoing draught in the eastern Mediterranean was the worst in the past 900 years. 

“Who does NASA think it is? We are better than them,” Eroğlu said during a discussion at Turkey’s parliament, after a reporter questioned NASA’s recent claims about the Levant region, which includes Turkey. 

Eroğlu argued Turkey’s technology was ahead of NASA’s, pointing out that the agency’s meteorological weather forecasts for the past year were not accurate. 

“They might have satellites but we have our Göktürk,” he said, referring to Turkey’s civil and military observation satellite. 

The minister further elaborated, explaining NASA studied weather data globally while Turkish studies focused on specific regions with some 1,450 active systems. 

“These are 1,237 automatic weather stations [AWS], 78 marine automatic meteorological observing stations [MAMOS], 72 automated airport weather stations, 10 upper-air observations, 35 lightning detection systems, 16 meteorological radars and two marine radars,” Eroğlu told reporters. 

NASA claimed early March 2016 that the recent drought in the Levant region, from 1998 to 2012, was drier than the worst drought of the past 900 years. 

NASA used data from tree rings to differentiate between natural droughts as opposed to droughts that were worsened by human-induced global warming. 

“If we look at recent events and we start to see anomalies that are outside this range of natural variability, then we can say with some confidence that it looks like this particular event or this series of events had some kind of human-caused climate change contribution,” Cook said. 

As part of the research published on its official website, NASA also underlined the gloomy future of the Mediterranean as one of the geographical regions that will dry out due to human-induced global warming. 

“The Mediterranean is one of the areas that is unanimously projected [in climate models] as going to dry [out] in the future [due to man-made climate change],” climate scientist Yochanan Kushnir from the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, who did not take part in the research, said, explained.