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.