| Summary: | One of the mostly investigated application areas in gravimetry missions e.g. GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) is drought monitoring from the hydrological perspective. When studying drought monitoring, scientific questions concerns primarily observed drought periods, spatial distribution of the drought, long-term mass change, impact on terrestrial water storage (TWS) variations and possible causes of the drought. Recently, NASA finds drought in the Eastern Mediterranean worst of past 900 years. Thus, it has been critical to study an eventual drought events in a Mediterranean climate region which has not been much investigated with satellite technics. GRACE Level 3 (Release05-RL05) monthly land mass data of the Centre for Space Research (CSR) processing center covering the period from April 2002 to January 2016, Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS: MOS, NOAH, VIC), and Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM-3B43) models and drought indices such as self-calibrating Palmer Drought Severity (SCPDSI), El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) are used to reply above-mentioned scientific questions in Turkey as study area. We found that GRACE results reveal drought periods by a significant decrease in the TWS signal. The spatial distribution of the drought is primarily conducted by the precipitation patterns. Turkey observe a decreasing annual trend of TWS with 1 cm/yr. GRACE is more sensitive to meteorological drought and can predict a possible drought event 9 months before compared to traditional studies. One possible reason of the drought in Turkey seems to be related with the La Nina effect from the climatic perspective.
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