Spatiotemporal changes in Iranian rivers’ discharge

University of California Press 2023

Trends in river flow at national scale in Iran remain largely unclear, despite good coverage of river flow at multiple monitoring stations. To address this gap, this study explores the changes in Iranian rivers’ discharge using regression and analysis of variance methods to historically rich data measured at hydrometric stations. Our assessment is performed for 139 selected hydrometric stations located in Iranian data-rich basins that cover around 97% of the country’s rivers with more than 30 years of observations. Our findings show that most of the studied Iran’s rivers (>56%) have undergone a downward trend (P value < 0.1) in mean annual flow that is 2.5 times bigger than that obtained for the large world’s rivers, resulting in a change from permanent to intermittent for around 20% of rivers in Iran’s subbasins. Given no significant change observed in the main natural drivers of Iranian rivers’ discharge, these findings reveal the country’s surface fresh-water shortage was caused dominantly by anthropogenic disturbances rather than variability in climate parameters. It may even indicate the development of new river regimes with deep implications for future surface fresh-water storage in the country. This research’s findings improve our understanding of changes in Iranian rivers’ discharge and provide beneficial insights for sustainable management of water resources in the country.

Anthropogenic disturbance; Climate change; Iran; River discharge; info:eu-repo/semantics/article; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Open access content. Open access content
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
© 2023 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

application/pdf
English

OUX oai:oulu.fi:nbnfi-fe2023081495544
urn:nbn:fi-fe2023081495544
1394149883

UNIV OF OULU
From OAIster®, provided by the OCLC Cooperative.

edsoai.on1394149883