Water-Level Fluctuations of Urmia Lake: Relationship with the Long-Term Changes of Meteorological Variables (Solutions for Water-Crisis Management in Urmia Lake Basin)

Abstract

Urmia Lake in northwest of Iran, through the recent years has been extremely faced with the water crisis. Climate variations and anthropogenic impacts could be two main affiliated factors in this regard. We considered the long term data series of precipitation, temperature and evaporation in monthly and yearly scales in order to compare to water-level values of Urmia Lake. The statistics approaches such as: standard deviation, trend analysis, T test, Pearson and Spearman correlations, liner regression are used to analyze all variables. The results released that the water-level of Urmia Lake along with the precipitation and temperature of the lake's basin have experienced the periodic changes through 1961 to 2010, as there are some gradual dryness trends on the study area according to precipitation and temperature variations. Urmia Lake periodic water-level fluctuations show more significant correlation to temperature than the precipitation. Whiles, the water-level's decreasing behavior especially through 1998 to 2010 is more harsh and different than the rate that is considered for precipitation's decrease and temperature's increase. Thus, there could be some anthropogenic factors in the basin which produced some supplementary causes to shrink Urmia Lake. Extracting the double precipitation over the basin through introducing and categorizing of atmospheric synoptic systems in order to cloud seeding operation could be one of urgent and innovative solutions to mitigate water crisis in the basin.

Climate change or irrigated agriculture – what drives the water level decline of Lake Urmia

“…This was mainly triggered by an uncontrolled growth of the irrigated area, accompanied by the extensive construction of reservoirs, and poor agricultural water use efficiency. Several studies base their conclusions on trend analysis of hydro-meteorological data sets 8,19,22,23 . While Jalili et al 19 and Khazaei et al 22 identified only weak correlations between meteorological variables and lake level and hence concluded that mainly anthropogenic changes caused the lake level decline, Alizadeh-Choobari et al 8 and Zoljoodi and Didevarasl 23 could identify more pronounced trends in climate variables, i.e.…”

Unraveling the Water-Energy-Food-Environment Nexus for Climate Change Adaptation in Iran: Urmia Lake Basin Case-Study

“…The freshwater input to this lake comes from surface resources (17 permanent rivers and 12 seasonal rivers [50]), of which the Zarine, Simine, and Ajichai rivers provide the largest proportion. The water level in this lake started to decrease sharply from 1995 [50] and has registered negative trends since then [51].…”

Paleo Mega Lake of Rey Identification and Reconstruction of Quaternary Lake in Central Iran

“…Climate change in the Middle East (Akkermanns et al 2010;Peterson et al 1979;Dastorani et al 2011), especially in Iran has been reported by many authors (Kehl 2009;Mohammadi 2012;Farshad 2013;Amiri and Eslamian 2012;Schmidt et al 2011;Lateef 1988;Kehl et al 2009). Change in the water levels in the lakes around the world (Street and Grove 1979) as well as the Urmia lake (Zoljoodi and Didevarasl 2014;Jahanbakhsh, Adalatdost, and Tadayoni 2011;Mahmoei et al 2012), Sistan Playa (Jarahi and Nadalian 2013b;Vekerdy and Dost 2006;Smith 1974;Costantini and Tosi 1978), Hoze Soltan Playa (Huntington 1905) Haj-Ali-Qoli Playa (Jarahi and Nadalian 2013a;Mousavi et al 2013), Great Kavir Desert (Jarahi 2016;Jarahi, Naraghiaraghi, and Nadalian 2016), Zaribar Lake (Snyder et al 2001;Stevens, Wright, andIto 2001), Caspian Sea (Naderi Beni et al 2013;Ramezani et al 2008), and other places (in Iran) has been studied previously (Mehrshahi 2002;Roberts and Wright 1993;Ramesht 2001). Various extensive studies have been conducted about the ancient lakes in the world.…”