TITLE:
Water-Level Fluctuations of Urmia Lake: Relationship with the Long-Term Changes of Meteorological Variables (Solutions for Water-Crisis Management in Urmia Lake Basin)
AUTHORS:
Mojtaba Zoljoodi, Ali Didevarasl
KEYWORDS:
Urmia Lake, Water-Level Fluctuation, Climate Variations, Water Crisis, Anthropogenic Impacts, Cloud Seeding Operation
JOURNAL NAME:
Atmospheric and Climate Sciences,
Vol.4 No.3,
July
9,
2014
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.