Evaporation from the dried-up lake bed of Lake Urmia, Iran.

Lake Urmia in north-western Iran was once one of the world's largest hyper-saline lakes and represented a unique ecosystem for a number of endangered species. The lake's shrinking over the past decades has attracted considerable attention and several studies have addressed its water balance. Yet, evaporation of shallow groundwater from the dried-up lake bed has not been fully quantified - despite the appreciable size of these areas (approx.

Climate change or irrigated agriculture - what drives the water level decline of Lake Urmia.

Lake Urmia is one of the largest hypersaline lakes on earth with a unique biodiversity. Over the past two decades the lake water level declined dramatically, threatening the functionality of the lake's ecosystems. There is a controversial debate about the reasons for this decline, with either mismanagement of the water resources, or climatic changes assumed to be the main cause.

The Lake Urmia environmental disaster in Iran: A look at aerosol pollution.

Lake Urmia (LU) once was the second largest hypersaline lake in the world, covering up to 6000km, but has undergone catastrophic desiccation in recent years resulting in loss of 90% of its area and extensive coverage by playas and marshlands that represent a source of salt and dust. This study examines daily Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) between 2001 and 2015 over northwestern Iran, which encompasses LU. Intriguingly, salt emissions from the LU surface associated with ongoing desiccation do not drive the study region's AOD profile, whereas pollution transported from other regions and emissions around LU are more important.

Evaluation of permeable pavement responses to urban surface runoff.

The construction of permeable pavement (PP) in sidewalks of urban areas is an alternative low impact development (LID) to control stormwater runoff volume and consequently decrease the discharge of pollutants in receiving water bodies. In this paper, some laboratory experiments were performed to evaluate the efficiency of a PP subjected to sediment loadings during its life span. Simple infiltration models were validated by the laboratory experiments to evaluate the trend and extend of PP infiltration capacity throughout the life of the pavement operation.

Spatial-temporal assessment and redesign of groundwater quality monitoring network: a case study.

Assessment of groundwater quality monitoring networks requires methods to determine the potential efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the current monitoring programs. To this end, the concept of entropy has been considered as a promising method in previous studies since it quantitatively measures the information produced by a network. In this study, the measure of transinformation in the discrete entropy theory and the transinformation-distance (T-D) curves, which are used frequently by other researchers, are used to quantify the efficiency of a monitoring network.