Investigation on climate change impact on Lake Urmia ecosystem

Lake Urmia, the largest territorial lake, has a great role on climate balance in the region. In recent decades, agricultural and industrial activities, infrastructural and water resources developmentprojects has been extremely propagated. Thereby, such activities have a remarkable impact on ecological condition and water level of Lake Urmia. Although climate change also plays a great role on water level, its effect on the lake considering its bathymetry has not yet been studied. In arecent study [1] which uses neural network to find water level in future, the minimum observedwater level from shoreline stations has been used and there is no investigation and no water level calculation on the lower depth of the lake.In this study, considering that the lake has a cupule shape and shows different water levels due to a specific continuous evaporation, after applying the climate change current trend on the lake, andusing a hydrodynamical model, the water depth has been calculated regarding to lake input and output data using bathymetry to find reduction in volume and area of the lake and the proceeding impacts has been discussed and finally some suggestions has been made [2].

Keywords:

Lake Urmia , Climate change , salinity , ecosystem