Compounding Impacts of Drought and Increased Human Water Withdrawal on Lake Urmia
Abstract
Recently, drought and increase in human water withdrawal have caused ecological degradation in several terminal lakes worldwide. Among them, the shallow and hyper-saline Urmia Lake in Iran has experienced about 6 m drawdown in lake level and 80% reduction in surface area. Here, we assess the imposed stress on Urmia Basin's water availability and Lake's ecological condition in response to coupled climate change and human-induced water withdrawal. A generalized river basin decision support system model consisting network flow is developed to simulate the basin-lake interactions under a wide range of scenarios. This model optimizes water allocations based on available inflow, reservoir storage, downstream demands, and reservoirs/demand priorities. Studied scenarios represent a wide range of historic climate and water use scenarios including a historical baseline, future increase in future water demand and also improved water efficiency. In this presentation, we show the lake's water level, as a measure of lake's ecological health, under the compounding effects of the climate condition (top-down) and water use (bottom-up) scenarios. This method illustrates what combinations lead to failure in meeting the lake's ecological level.
- Publication:
-
EGU General Assembly Conference Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- April 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018EGUGA..2011172A