| 1. |
- Noori, Roohollah, et al.
(författare)
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Anthropogenic depletion of Iran's aquifers
- 2021
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. - : Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. - 0027-8424 .- 1091-6490. ; 118:25
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Global groundwater assessments rank Iran among countries with the highest groundwater depletion rate using coarse spatial scales that hinder detection of regional imbalances between renewable groundwater supply and human withdrawals. Herein, we use in situ data from 12,230 piezometers, 14,856 observation wells, and groundwater extraction points to provide ground-based evidence about Iran’s widespread groundwater depletion and salinity problems. While the number of groundwater extraction points increased by 84.9% from 546,000 in 2002 to over a million in 2015, the annual groundwater withdrawal decreased by 18% (from 74.6 to 61.3 km3/y) primarily due to physical limits to fresh groundwater resources (i.e., depletion and/or salinization). On average, withdrawing 5.4 km3/y of nonrenewable water caused groundwater tables to decline 10 to 100 cm/y in different regions, averaging 49 cm/y across the country. This caused elevated annual average electrical conductivity (EC) of groundwater in vast arid/semiarid areas of central and eastern Iran (16 out of 30 subbasins), indicating “very high salinity hazard” for irrigation water. The annual average EC values were generally lower in the wetter northern and western regions, where groundwater EC improvements were detected in rare cases. Our results based on high-resolution groundwater measurements reveal alarming water security threats associated with declining fresh groundwater quantity and quality due to many years of unsustainable use. Our analysis offers insights into the environmental implications and limitations of water-intensive development plans that other water-scarce countries might adopt.
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| 2. |
- AghaKouchak, Amir, et al.
(författare)
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Anthropogenic Drought : Definition, Challenges, and Opportunities
- 2021
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Ingår i: Reviews of geophysics. - : John Wiley & Sons. - 8755-1209 .- 1944-9208. ; 59:2
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Traditional, mainstream definitions of drought describe it as deficit in water-related variables or water-dependent activities (e.g., precipitation, soil moisture, surface and groundwater storage, and irrigation) due to natural variabilities that are out of the control of local decision-makers. Here, we argue that within coupled human-water systems, drought must be defined and understood as a process as opposed to a product to help better frame and describe the complex and interrelated dynamics of both natural and human-induced changes that define anthropogenic drought as a compound multidimensional and multiscale phenomenon, governed by the combination of natural water variability, climate change, human decisions and activities, and altered micro-climate conditions due to changes in land and water management. This definition considers the full spectrum of dynamic feedbacks and processes (e.g., land-atmosphere interactions and water and energy balance) within human-nature systems that drive the development of anthropogenic drought. This process magnifies the water supply demand gap and can lead to water bankruptcy, which will become more rampant around the globe in the coming decades due to continuously growing water demands under compounding effects of climate change and global environmental degradation. This challenge has de facto implications for both short-term and long-term water resources planning and management, water governance, and policymaking. Herein, after a brief overview of the anthropogenic drought concept and its examples, we discuss existing research gaps and opportunities for better understanding, modeling, and management of this phenomenon.
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| 3. |
- Alborzi, Aneseh, et al.
(författare)
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Climate-informed environmental inflows to revive a drying lake facing meteorological and anthropogenic droughts
- 2018
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Ingår i: Environmental Research Letters. - : IOP Publishing. - 1748-9326. ; 13:8
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The rapid shrinkage of Lake Urmia, one of the world's largest saline lakes located in northwestern Iran, is a tragic wake-up call to revisit the principles of water resources management based on the socio-economic and environmental dimensions of sustainable development. The overarching goal of this paper is to set a framework for deriving dynamic, climate-informed environmental inflows for drying lakes considering both meteorological/climatic and anthropogenic conditions. We report on the compounding effects of meteorological drought and unsustainable water resource management that contributed to Lake Urmia's contemporary environmental catastrophe. Using rich datasets of hydrologic attributes, water demands and withdrawals, as well as water management infrastructure (i.e. reservoir capacity and operating policies), we provide a quantitative assessment of the basin's water resources, demonstrating that Lake Urmia reached a tipping point in the early 2000s. The lake level failed to rebound to its designated ecological threshold (1274 m above sea level) during a relatively normal hydro-period immediately after the drought of record (1998-2002). The collapse was caused by a marked overshoot of the basin's hydrologic capacity due to growing anthropogenic drought in the face of extreme climatological stressors. We offer a dynamic environmental inflow plan for different climate conditions (dry, wet and near normal), combined with three representative water withdrawal scenarios. Assuming effective implementation of the proposed 40% reduction in the current water withdrawals, the required environmental inflows range from 2900 million cubic meters per year (mcm yr(-1)) during dry conditions to 5400 mcm yr(-1) during wet periods with the average being 4100 mcm yr(-1). Finally, for different environmental inflow scenarios, we estimate the expected recovery time for re-establishing the ecological level of Lake Urmia.
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| 4. |
- Ashraf, Samaneh, et al.
(författare)
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Compounding effects of human activities and climatic changes on surface water availability in Iran
- 2019
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Ingår i: Climatic Change. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0165-0009 .- 1573-1480. ; 152:3-4, s. 379-391
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- By combining long-term ground-based data on water withdrawal with climate model projections, this study quantifies the compounding effects of human activities and climate change on surface water availability in Iran over the twenty-first century. Our findings show that increasing water withdrawal in Iran, due to population growth and increased agricultural activities, has been the main source of historical water stress. Increased levels of water stress across Iran are expected to continue or even worsen over the next decades due to projected variability and change in precipitation combined with heightened water withdrawals due to increasing population and socio-economic activities. The greatest rate of decreased water storage is expected in the Urmia Basin, northwest of Iran, (varying from -8.3mm/year in 2010-2039 to -61.6mm/year in 2070-2099 compared with an observed rate of 4mm/year in 1976-2005). Human activities, however, strongly dominate the effects of precipitation variability and change. Major shifts toward sustainable land and water management are needed to reduce the impacts of water scarcity in the future, particularly in Iran's heavily stressed basins like Urmia Basin, which feeds the shrinking Lake Urmia.
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| 5. |
- Tootoonchi, Faranak, et al.
(författare)
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Copulas for hydroclimatic analysis : A practice‐oriented overview
- 2022
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Ingår i: WIREs Water. - : Wiley. - 2049-1948.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- A warming climate is associated with increasing hydroclimatic extremes, which are often interconnected through complex processes, prompting their concurrence and/or succession, and causing compound extreme events. It is critical to analyze the risks of compound events, given their disproportionately high adverse impacts. To account for the variability in two or more hydroclimatic variables (e.g., temperature and precipitation) and their dependence, a rising number of publications focuses on multivariate analysis, among which the notion of copula-based probability distribution has attracted tremendous interest. Copula is a mathematical function that expresses the joint cumulative probability distribution of multiple variables. Our focus is to re-emphasize the fundamental requirements and limitations of applying copulas. Confusion about these requirements may lead to misconceptions and pitfalls, which can potentially compromise the robustness of risk analyses for environmental processes and natural hazards. We conducted a systematic literature review of copulas, as a prominent tool in the arsenal of multivariate methods used for compound event analysis, and underpinned them with a hydroclimatic case study in Sweden to illustrate a practical approach to copula-based modeling. Here, we (1) provide end-users with a didactic overview of necessary requirements, statistical assumptions and consequential limitations of copulas, (2) synthesize common perceptions and practices, and (3) offer a user-friendly decision support framework to employ copulas, thereby support researchers and practitioners in addressing hydroclimatic hazards, hence demystify what can be an area of confusion.
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| 6. |
- Abbafati, Cristiana, et al.
(författare)
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- 2020
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)
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