Not many bathymetric maps are available for many lakes and reservoirs in developing countries. Usually the bathymetric mapping requires investment in expensive equipment and fieldwork, both of which are not accessible in these countries. This work demonstrates the ability to develop bathymetric map of Mosul Lake by using a digital elevation model (DEM). The depths model of the lake was designed through the use of three main stages; a coastline extraction, dataset interpolation and a triangular irregular network model. The normalized difference water index (NDWI) was used for automatic delineation of the lake coastline from satellite images. The ordinary kriging interpolation with a stable model was used to interpolate the water depths dataset. Finally a triangulated irregular network (TIN) model was used to visualize the resulting interpolation model. Calculated values of area and volume of a TIN model during 2011 were compared with values of supposed initial operation of the reservoir. The differences of water volume storage between these stages at 321 m water level was about 0.81 × 10 9 m 3 , where the lake lost around 10% of storage value. Also the results of depths lake model show that the change in water storage between March and July 2011 was about 3.08 × 10 9 m 3 .

Until now, it has been well-established that coral complex in the Arabian/Persian Gulf only exist in the coastal regions of Bahrain, Iran, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates and it was thought that there are no coral reefs in Iraq. However, here for the first time we show the existence of a living 28 km2 large coral reef in this country. These corals are adapted to one of the most extreme coral-bearing environments on earth: the seawater temperature in this area ranges between 14 and 34°C. The discovery of the unique coral reef oasis in the turbid coastal waters of Iraq will stimulate the interest of governmental agencies, environmental organizations, as well as of the international scientific community working on the fundamental understanding of coral marine ecosystems and global climate today.

As a downstream region, Iraq was ranked among the richest Middle Eastern countries with regards to water resources. The world witnessed the emergence of a magnificent ancient civilization that largely relied on agriculture with extraordinary irrigation systems. However, during the last decade, Iraq began to suffer dramatically from inadequate water shares, desertification, and several other environmental issues due to the absence of proper resource management and, not least, various political conflicts. Numerous global water wars, particularly ones involving developing countries, reflect the importance of water shares and potential demand for water. Iraq, Turkey, and Syria, riparian watercourse countries, have engaged in a long-term water dispute that continues to yield no end through mutual agreement. This present work highlights the major events of this dispute, evaluates the causes and current water challenges, and provides a comprehensive solution through the establishment of the Iraqi Water Security Council.

Groundwater modelling is particularly challenging in arid regions where limited water recharge is available. A fault zone will add a significant challenge to the modelling process. The Western Desert in Iraq has been chosen to implement the modelling concept and calculate the model sensitivity to the changes in aquifer hydraulic properties and calibration by researching 102 observations and irrigation wells. MODFLOW-NWT, which is a Newtonian formulation for MODFLOW-2005 approaches, have been used in this study. Further, the simulation run has been implemented using the Upstream-Weighting package (UPW) to treat the dry cells. The results show sensitivity to the change of the Kx value for the major groundwater discharge flow. Only about 7% of the models from the region can be irrigated utilizing greenhouses supported by external recharge.

Catchment area and watershed delineation is a common task in hydrology. The determination of the catchment is still as a challenge considered being crucial key issues particular in flat terrains. Three concepts could be briefly identified through: the manual delineation of a catchment based on a topographic map with contour lines which is a difficult task for flat terrains, by combination of field survey or evaluation of satellite images. The present research is focus on evaluating the possibility to delineate catchments from flat and arid areas by means of DTM avoiding hard techniques like river burning or other manual hydrological DTM corrections. Three GIS packages were used (Arc Hydrotools, TNTmips and RiverTools) within two DEM: the 90 m and 30 m SRTM in addition to the ASTER 30 m, the application sample presented by western Iraq desert—Ubaiydh wadi. A brief review is given how the delineation algorithms have been developed since the 1980’s. Where result shows that automated watershed analysis of flat terrains is cannot be done without manual evaluation and correction either by using several seeding points or river burning technique