Teleconnections between ocean-atmosphere circulations and historical integrated drought in the Middle East and North Africa.

In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) with extreme water scarcity worldwide, drought significantly impacts various aspects of the local people. This study uses the empirical multivariate standardized drought index (MSDI), wavelet power spectrum, and a blind source septation technique of independent component analysis (ICA) to unravel linkages between Atlantic- and Pacific-based climate indices and MENA's drought between Jan 1979 and Dec 2016. It is found that drought in the eastern MENA is more than its western linked to climate indices.

Chemistry of the Karst Sarabkalan Spring, Iran, and Controls of PDO and ENSO Climate Indices on It.

The Sarabkalan Spring serves as a primary water supply to irrigation and domestic use in the Sirvan Region, Iran. As it has a highly variable discharge, understanding its teleconnections with large-scale climate variability is crucial. In this study, we first characterize the springshed and its corresponding karst aquifer system using genetic algorithm analysis on the spring discharge, water balance calculations, temporal variations of physicochemical parameters, and stable isotopes along with considering its geological settings.

Large-scale climate variability controls on climate, vegetation coverage, lake and groundwater storage in the Lake Urmia watershed using SSA and wavelet analysis.

Lake Urmia has shrunk by 88% since 1995 and is an outstanding example of an environmental tragedy in the Middle East, and the lake plays a critical role in the environment, economics, and society in the north-western part of Iran. It has been hypothesized that the drying of Lake Urmia has caused by climate variation and a climate-derived increase in droughts. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the teleconnections between the interannual to multidecadal climate variability and Lake Urmia because of the tangible implications for water resource management and policy decisions in the region.

Improvement of water table interpolation and groundwater storage volume using fuzzy computations.

The water table is an important piece of data for hydrogeological studies, particularly as input data to groundwater simulation models. Since the accuracy of groundwater simulation models significantly depends on input data, this study highlights the application of fuzzy kriging to improve the accuracy of water table interpolation. The results of the fuzzy kriging approach are compared with common methods in water table interpolation like ordinary kriging, inverse distance weighting (IDW), and Thiessen polygon methods to justify the suitability of the fuzzy kriging.

Impact of thin aquitards on two-dimensional solute transport in an aquifer.

The influence of aquitards on solute transport in an aquifer is an important and often overlooked process for subsurface contaminant transport. In particular, slow advection (leakage) into an aquitard is often neglected in previous analytical treatment of solute transport, making such analytical solutions unsuitable for benchmarking numerical simulations of transport when aquitard leakage exists. In this study, a semi-analytical solution to the two-dimensional conservative solute transport in an aquifer bounded by thin aquitards is derived in the Laplace domain.

The effect of ramadan fasting on biochemical and performance parameters in collegiate wrestlers.

Objectives: This study was designed to evaluate the effect of Ramadan fasting on body composition, aerobic and anaerobic power, strength, plasma lipids profile and serum glucose among collegiate wrestlers.

Materials And Methods: Fourteen male collegiate wrestlers (age, 20.12±2.

Interaction of a fresh water lake and a karstic spring via a syncline fold.

Kaftar Lake is a high-altitude fresh water lake located in High Zagros, south of Iran. Despite the high annual evaporation to precipitation ratio in the area, lake water electrical conductivity is usually lower than 1000 µS/cm, this may be due to high seepage from the floor of the lake. Therefore, the hypothesis of possible underground connections between Namdan Basin, where the lake is located, and the surrounding basins with lower elevation (Aspas and Dehbid Basins) was investigated.