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 innorthwest of Iran, through the recent years has been extremely faced with thewater crisis. Climate variations and anthropogenic impacts could be two mainaffiliated factors in this regard. We considered the long term data series ofprecipitation, temperature and evaporation in monthly and yearly scales inorder to compare to water-level values of Urmia Lake. The statistics approachessuch as: standard deviation, trend analysis, T test, Pearson and Spearmancorrelations, liner regression are used to analyze all variables. The resultsreleased that the water-level of Urmia Lake along with the precipitation and temperatureof 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 toprecipitation and temperature variations. Urmia Lake periodic water-levelfluctuations show more significant correlation to temperature than theprecipitation. Whiles, the water-level’s decreasing behavior especially through1998 to 2010 is more harsh and different than the rate that is considered forprecipitation’s decrease and temperature’s increase. Thus, there could be someanthropogenic factors in the basin which produced some supplementary causes toshrink Urmia Lake. Extracting the double precipitation over the basin throughintroducing and categorizing of atmospheric synoptic systems in order to cloudseeding operation could be one of urgent and innovative solutions to mitigatewater crisis in the basin.