Despite having a more advanced water management system than most Middle Eastern countries, similar to the other countries in the region, Iran is experiencing a serious water crisis. The government blames the current crisis on the changing climate, frequent droughts, and international sanctions, believing that water shortages are periodic. However, the dramatic water security issues of Iran are rooted in decades of disintegrated planning and managerial myopia. Iran has suffered from a symptom-based management paradigm, which mainly focuses on curing the problem symptoms rather than addressing the main causes. This paper reviews the current status of water resources in Iran and recognizes three major causes for the current water crisis: (1) rapid population growth and inappropriate spatial population distribution; (2) inefficient agriculture sector; and (3) mismanagement and thirst for development. The country is faced with serious challenges in the water sector, including but not limited to rising water demand and shortage, declining groundwater levels, deteriorating water quality, and increasing ecosystem losses. If immediate actions are not taken to address these issues, the situation could become more tragic in the near future. The paper suggests some crisis exit strategies that need to be immediately adopted to secure sustainable water resources, if Iran does not want to lose its international reputation for significant success in water resources management over thousands of years in an arid area of the world.

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Water management in Iran: what is causing the looming crisis?

http://amir.eng.uci.edu/publications/15_Urmia_JGLR.pdf

Aral Sea syndrome desiccates Lake Urmia: Call for action

Spatiotemporal trends and change point of precipitation in Iran

Drought is a natural and worldwide phenomenon that occurs when water availability is significantly below normal levels during a significant period of time and cannot meet demand. This work focused on the hydrologic drought defined by the streamflow drought index (SDI) for overlapping periods of 3, 6, 9 and 12 months at 14 hydrometric stations in the northwest of Iran over the period 1975–2009. It was found that some of the streamflow volume series did not follow the normal distribution. The ability of the log-normal, exponential and uniform probability distributions was examined in order to choose the most suitable distribution, and the log-normal distribution was used to fit the long-term streamflow data. The results of the hydrological drought analysis based on the SDI showed that almost all the stations suffered from extreme droughts during the study period. Additionally, extreme droughts occurred most frequently in the last 12 years from 1997–1998 to 2008–2009.

Hydrological Drought Assessment in Northwestern Iran Based on Streamflow Drought Index (SDI)

https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1048&context=agroenviron

Trends and variability of daily temperature extremes during 1960-2012 in the Yangtze River Basin, China

Groundwater is the main source of water supply for drinking and agriculture uses in Mazandaran province. In recent years, the rapid growth of population and the increased need for water and food has put its land and water resources under severe stress. The main objective of this study was to investigate the temporal trends in annual, seasonal and monthly groundwater level using the Mann–Kendall test and the Sen’s slope estimator in the area during 1985–2007. The results indicated a mix of negative and positive trends in the groundwater level series. However, the positive trends were much more than negative ones. The statistical tests detected a significant increasing trend in more than 28% of the wells. The stronger increasing trends were identified in the series in summer and spring compared with those in autumn and winter. Moreover, the highest numbers of wells with significant positive trends occurred in August and July, respectively. The results of spatial analysis showed that the significant positive trends were concentrated in the central parts of Mazandaran province where paddy fields are the major water demanders. Analysis of climatic parameters revealed that decreasing trend of relative humidity and increasing trends of minimum and maximum air temperature can be attributed to groundwater level fluctuations in the study region. The research will be helpful for planners and policy makers to allocate groundwater resources in different sectors including agriculture, drinking and industry.

Investigation of groundwater level fluctuations in the north of Iran

Monitoring the temporal variations of reference evapotranspiration (ETo) and quantifying any trends offer valuable information for regional hydrology, agricultural water requirements and water resources management. This study aimed to examine the temporal trends in the Penman–Monteith ETo in the west and southwest of Iran by using the Kendall and Spearman tests after eliminating the influence of significant lag-1 serial correlation from the ETo time series. The magnitudes and starting years of significant ETo trends were determined by the Mann-Kendall rank statistic and the Theil–Sen’s estimator, respectively. For the study period of 1966–2005, a significant positive lag-1 serial correlation coefficient was observed at almost all the stations. The existence of the positive serial correlation in the ETo series increased the possibility of the Kendall and Spearman tests to reject the null hypothesis of no trend while it is true. It was found that the Kendall test was more sensitive than the Spearman test to the existence of the positive serial correlation in the ETo series. After removing the serial correlation effect with pre-whitening method, only three significant increasing ETo trends were obtained at Khorram-Abad, Shahrekord and Zanjan stations at the rates of 0.16, 0.06 and 0.06 mm/day per decade, respectively. The significant increasing ETo trends of Khorram-Abad, Zanjan and Shahrekord stations started in 1997, 1994 and 1998, respectively. The stepwise regression method showed that wind speed was the most dominating variable affecting on the significant changes of ETo.

Identification of Trend in Reference Evapotranspiration Series with Serial Dependence in Iran

The streamflow drought is the most important type of drought due to the high dependence of many activities on surface water resources. The streamflow drought severity was identified by the percent of normal index (PNI) in the western basins of the Lake Urmia located in northwest Iran. The streamflow records were obtained from 14 hydrometric stations for the period October 1975–September 2009. The temporal trends of the streamflow drought severity were detected by the parametric Student’s t test and the nonparametric Mann–Kendall and Sen’s tests. The worst streamflow droughts at almost all the stations occurred in 1999–2000 and 2000–2001. The streamflow drought severity based on the PNI increased during the last 34 years. The results also indicated that the temporal dependency of time series had a dominant role in detecting trend by the parametric Student’s t test.

Streamflow drought severity analysis by percent of normal index (PNI) in northwest Iran

To investigate effects of putrescine (Put) and humic acid (HA) on fruit yield and physiological attributes of okra (Abelmoschus esculentus L. 'Kano') under water deficit stress, a field experiment was conducted in split plot based on a randomized complete block design with three replications. Plants were exposed to three different irrigation regimes (33%, 66% and 100% ETc) and were treated with foliar application of Put (0, 0.5, 1 and 1.5 mM) and HA (0, 150 and 300 mg l-1). The results showed that deficit irrigation significantly decreased fruit yield, relative water content (RWC), vitamin C and water use efficiency (WUE), whereas proline content and catalase and peroxidase activities were increased. Foliar application of HA and Put significantly increased fruit yield, RWC, vitamin C and proline contents, catalase and peroxidase activities and WUE. The results suggested that HA at 300 mg l-1 and Put at 1.5 mM can improve growth, yield and quality of okra fruits.

https://ijhst.ut.ac.ir/article_62918_a64920d67ee2df69ead36eccc0a96e88.pdf

Jaefar Nikbakht

Papers

Hydrological Drought Assessment in Northwestern Iran Based on Streamflow Drought Index (SDI)

Investigation of groundwater level fluctuations in the north of Iran

Identification of Trend in Reference Evapotranspiration Series with Serial Dependence in Iran

Streamflow drought severity analysis by percent of normal index (PNI) in northwest Iran

Physiological response of Okra cv. Kano to foliar application of putrescine and humic acid under water deficit stress