Observed climate variability and change in Urmia Lake Basin, Iran

Delju, Amir H.; Ceylan, Alpaslan; Piguet, Étienne; Rebetez, Martine

doi:10.1007/s00704-012-0651-9

Cited by 183 publications

(97 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Lake Urmia (Urumiyeh in Persian), bound by 37°03′N to 38°17′N and 44°59′E to 45°59′E, has a maximum depth of 16 m and is about 140 km long and 40-55 km wide [29]. The lake is a shallow and saline lake that is located in the northwest of Iran.…”

Section: Study Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The lake is currently in a critical situation as a consequence of decreasing surface water area and increasing salinity. To facilitate expanding agricultural activities 35 dams have been constructed on 21 rivers flowing to the lake [29]. These dams, the exploitation of ground water and increased water demand for industrial and domestic uses, being intensified by a long period of drought, have been the major factors contributing to the shrinkage of the lake surface area [31].…”

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confidence: 99%

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Water Feature Extraction and Change Detection Using Multitemporal Landsat Imagery

et al. 2014

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Lake Urmia is the 20th largest lake and the second largest hyper saline lake (before September 2010) in the world. It is also the largest inland body of salt water in the Middle East. Nevertheless, the lake has been in a critical situation in recent years due to decreasing surface water and increasing salinity. This study modeled the spatiotemporal changes of Lake Urmia in the period 2000-2013 using the multi-temporal Landsat 5-TM, 7-ETM+ and 8-OLI images. In doing so, the applicability of different satellite-derived indexes including Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI), Modified NDWI (MNDWI), Normalized Difference Moisture Index (NDMI), Water Ratio Index (WRI), Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), and Automated Water Extraction Index (AWEI) were investigated for the extraction of surface water from Landsat data. Overall, the NDWI was found superior to other indexes and hence it was used to model the spatiotemporal changes of the lake. In addition, a new approach based on Principal Components of multi-temporal NDWI (NDWI-PCs) was proposed and evaluated for surface water change detection. The results indicate an intense decreasing trend in Lake Urmia surface area in the period 2000-2013, especially between 2010 and 2013 4174 lake lost about one third of its surface area compared to the year 2000. The results illustrate the effectiveness of the NDWI-PCs approach for surface water change detection, especially in detecting the changes between two and three different times, simultaneously.

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Section: Study Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Water Feature Extraction and Change Detection Using Multitemporal Landsat Imagery

et al. 2014

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“…Precipitation reduction, temperature increase, agricultural development including construction of man-made dams and building a causeway across the lake have been identified as the main reasons for the degradation of Lake Urmia (Abbaspour and Nazaridoust, 2007;Zeinoddini et al, 2009;Delju et al, 2012;Jalili et al, 2012;Sima and Tajrishy, 2013;Fathian et al, 2014;Farajzadeh et al, 2014;Banihabib et al, 2015;AghaKouchak et al, 2015;Azarnivand et al, 2015;Alizadeh-Choobari et al, 15 2016;Ghale et al, 2018). Using Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite observations, altimetry data for Lake Urmia and outputs of the Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS), Forootan et al (2014) estimated the trend of groundwater storage changes in the Lake Urmia basin as -11.2 mm/yr between the years of 2005 to 2011, the largest decrease of the six investigated Iranian basins.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying the impacts of human water use and climate variations on recent drying of Lake Urmia basin: the value of different sets of spaceborne and in-situ data for calibrating a hydrological model

Hosseini‐Moghari¹,

Araghinejad²,

Tourian³

et al. 2018

Preprint

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Abstract. During the last decades, the endorheic Lake Urmia basin in northwestern Iran has suffered from decreased precipitation, groundwater levels and a very strong reduction in the volume and more recently also in the extent of Lake Urmia.Human water use has exacerbated the desiccating impact of climatic variations. This study quantifies the contribution of human water use to the reduction of inflow into Lake Urmia, to the loss of lake water volume and to the loss of groundwater and total water storage in the entire Lake Urmia basin during [2003][2004][2005][2006][2007][2008][2009][2010][2011][2012][2013]. To this end, the WaterGAP Global Hydrology Model (WGHM) 15 was manually calibrated specifically for the basin against multiple in-situ and spaceborne data, and the best-performing calibration variant was run with or without taking into account water use. Observation data encompass remote-sensing based time series of annual irrigated area in the basin from MODIS, monthly total water storage anomaly (TWSA) from GRACE satellites and monthly lake volume. In-situ observations include time series of annual inflow into the lake and basin averages of groundwater level variations based on 284 wells. In addition, local estimates of sectoral water withdrawals in 2009 and 20 return flow fractions were utilized. Four calibration variants were set up in which the number of considered observation types was increased in a stepwise fashion. The best fit to each and all observations is achieved if the maximum amount of observations is used for calibration. Calibration against GRACE TWSA improves simulated inflow into Lake Urmia but still overestimates it by 90%; it results in an overestimation of lake volume loss, underestimation of groundwater loss and a shifted seasonality of groundwater storage. Lake and groundwater dynamics can only be simulated well if calibration against 25 groundwater levels leads to adjusting the fractions of human water use from groundwater and surface water. According to our study, human water use was the reason for 50% of the total basin water loss of about 10 km 3 during 2003-2013, for 40% of the Lake Urmia water loss of about 8 km 3 and for up to 90% of the groundwater loss. Lake inflow was 40% less than it would have been without human water use. We found that even without human water use, Lake Urmia would not have recovered from the significant loss of lake water volume caused by the drought year 2008. These findings may serve to support water 30 management in the basin and more specifically Lake Urmia restoration plans.Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci. Discuss., https://doi

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“…The average inflow into the lake has declined from around 12,000 to 2,400•10 6 m 3 over the last four decades (Hamzekhani et al 2015). The mean annual precipitation is 341 mm year -1 which has decreased by 9.2% over the last 40 years (Delju et al 2013). …”

Section: Study Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The area of the agricultural lands has more than tripled over the last 40 years supported by a considerable number of reservoirs and a large irrigation network (Iran Ministry of Energy 2014). There has also been a significant decrease in precipitation and an increasing trend in average maximum temperature during the same period (Delju et al 2013, Fathian et al 2014. This has caused the most extreme droughts in the basin over the last few decades during the mid-1990s (Tabari et al 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preserving the world second largest hypersaline lake under future irrigation and climate change

Shadkam

Ludwig

Vliet

et al. 2016

Science of The Total Environment

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Abstract. Urmia Lake, the world second largest hypersaline lake, has been largely desiccated over the last two decades resulting in socio-environmental consequences similar or even larger than the Aral Sea disaster. To rescue the lake a new water management plan has been proposed, a rapid 40% decline in irrigation water use replacing a former plan which intended to develop reservoirs and irrigation. However, none of these water management plans, which have large socio-economic impacts, have been assessed under future changes in climate and water availability. By adapting a method of environmental flow requirements (EFRs) for hypersaline lakes, we estimated annually 3.7•10 9 m 3 water is needed to preserve Urmia Lake. Then, the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) hydrological model was forced with bias-corrected climate model outputs for both the lowest (RCP2.6) and highest (RCP8.5) greenhouse-gas concentration scenarios to estimate future water availability and impacts of water management strategies. Results showed a 10% decline in future water availability in the basin under RCP2.6 and 27% under RCP8.5. Our results showed that if future climate change is highly limited (RCP2.6) inflow can be just enough to meet the EFRs by implementing the reduction irrigation plan. However, under more rapid climate change scenario (RCP8.5) reducing irrigation water use will not be enough to save the lake and more drastic measures are needed. Our results showed that future water management plans are not robust under climate change in this region. Therefore, an integrated approach of future land-water use planning and climate change adaptation is therefore needed to improve future water security and to reduce the desiccating of this hypersaline lake.

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Observed climate variability and change in Urmia Lake Basin, Iran

Cited by 183 publications

References 6 publications

Water Feature Extraction and Change Detection Using Multitemporal Landsat Imagery

Water Feature Extraction and Change Detection Using Multitemporal Landsat Imagery

Quantifying the impacts of human water use and climate variations on recent drying of Lake Urmia basin: the value of different sets of spaceborne and in-situ data for calibrating a hydrological model

Preserving the world second largest hypersaline lake under future irrigation and climate change

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