Ali Mirchi

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at Oklahoma State University

Soil water content was monitored for two years (2022-2023) at 10-cm depth intervals within the root zone of variably irrigated pecan trees of a research orchard in central Oklahoma. Pecan root water uptake distribution across the top 1.2 m of the soil and pecan water use were estimated and analyzed with respect to the level of irrigation. The root...

Reliable information about the extent of irrigated areas is critical for water resources management in agricultural regions facing mounting water scarcity challenges due to climate variability and change, extreme events, and increased competition over limited water resources. To this end, we introduce a multi-model ensemble mapping (MEM) approach t...

Accurate simulation of irrigation is key for effective water resources planning and management across various scales. This paper presents SWAT-IRR, a new irrigation algorithm for the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model, designed to enhance the simulation of how different irrigation systems and schedules influence hydro-logic fluxes in irrig...

Study region: Lower Arkansas River Basin (LARB) in Colorado, USA. Study focus: The process of implementing irrigation in large river basins often results in significant changes in hydrologic pathways and fluxes, such as canal seepage, runoff, recharge, pumping, and groundwater-river exchange. The objective of this study is to quantify the hydrologi...

This study addresses the challenges of managing transboundary water resources characterized by data scarcity, focusing on the Indus Basin as a case study. Groundwater depletion in such regions poses a critical threat to food and water security, necessitating effective management strategies. We leverage Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE...

Groundwater systems play a pivotal role in ensuring food and water security while maintaining vital ecosystem functions. The depletion of numerous global aquifers, however, raises concerns regarding the sustainability of groundwater withdrawals and environmental flows. Despite efforts to mitigate this decline, there remains a striking gap in provin...

Droughts may exhibit spatiotemporal heterogeneity at regional scale. Effective drought assessment and management necessitates identifying homogeneous areas. However, previous studies often simplified clustering analysis by focusing only on a single variable. In this study, we present a novel drought risk map for the Southern Plains (SP) region of t...

Climate projections are being used for decision‐making related to climate mitigation and adaptation and as inputs for impacts modeling related to climate change. The plethora of available projections presents end users with the challenge of how to select climate projections, known as the “practitioner's dilemma.” In addition, if an end‐user determi...

In the context of global warming, the frequency, intensity, and duration of heatwave events have markedly increased, bearing profound implications for both natural ecosystems and human societies. To effectively cope with this challenge, it is imperative to accurately identify and comprehensively assess the risks posed by heatwaves. This study under...

GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) has been widely used to evaluate terrestrial water storage (TWS) and groundwater storage (GWS). However, the coarse‐resolution of GRACE data has limited the ability to identify local vulnerabilities in water storage changes associated with climatic and anthropogenic stressors. This study employs high‐...

Study region: The state of Oklahoma located in the Southern Plains region of the United States. Study focus: The standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI) is a widely used meteorological drought index that incorporates potential evapotranspiration (PET) into a precipitation-based index. However, the understanding of the appropriate...

As global climate change poses a challenge to crop production, it is imperative to prioritize effective adaptation of agricultural systems based on a scientific understanding of likely impacts. In this study, we applied an integrated watershed modeling framework to examine the impacts of projected climate on runoff, soil moisture, and soil erosion...

High-resolution, continuous groundwater data is important for place-based adaptive aquifer management. This information is unavailable in many areas due to spatial sparsity of and temporal gaps in groundwater monitoring. This study advances the ability to generate high-resolution (1 km 2), temporally continuous estimates of groundwater level (GWL)...

We used monthly climatological datasets from the NOAA US Climate Divisional Database to detect long-term trends (1951–2021) in the nine climate divisions of Oklahoma, USA. We applied Hargreaves-Samani method to calculate reference evapotranspiration (ETo) and used 12-month standardized precipitation index to characterize meteorological droughts. Mo...

Overexploitation of groundwater threatens groundwater-bound aquatic and terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystem stability, underscoring the need to devise appropriate mitigation strategies. Yet, substantial scientific evidence that mitigation measures effectively protect groundwater ecosystems is presently nonexistent. We provide unique and compelli...

Highlights The effects of soil data accuracy on estimated water fluxes by an irrigation scheduling model were investigated. Free and frequently used web soil survey (WSS) soil textural data underestimated sand particles in 89% of cases. Forty-nine percent of the estimated differences in seasonal irrigation based on WSS and measured soil data were w...

We provided high-resolution (1km) groundwater storage (GWS) and depletion (DEPgw) maps across Irrigated Indus Basin (IIB) for 2002-2019. We applied two independent methodologies (1) spatial downscaling for improving GRACE-based GWS data, and (2) SWAT (Soil Water Assessment Tool) and pixel-based water balance approach for DEPgw estimates. GWS were e...

Groundwater is a strategic resource for economic development, social justice, environmental sustainability, and water governance. The lower Casas Grandes River Basin, located in the state of Chihuahua, México, is in a semi-arid region with increasing groundwater demand and regional challenges such as drought and depletion of aquifers. Even though t...

Overexploitation of groundwater threatens groundwater-bound aquatic and terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystem stability, underscoring the need to devise appropriate mitigation strategies. Yet, there is no hindsight evidence that mitigation measures effectively protect groundwater-dependent habitats. We provide unique and compelling evidence, using...

Study region: The Middle Rio Grande (MRG), defined by the portion of the basin from Elephant Butte Reservoir in New Mexico to the confluence with the Rio Conchos in Far West Texas, U.S.A. and Northern Chihuahua, Mexico. Study focus: The future of water for the MRG and many other arid and semi-arid regions of the world is challenged by a changing cl...

Highlights Among six manufacturer calibrations, the default calibration resulted in the largest errors. Sensor performance was negatively affected by higher clay content and salinity. Sensor-based approaches to estimating field capacity were inconsistent and spatially variable. Abstract. Maintaining the economic and environmental sustainability of...

Study region Middle Section of the Rio Grande Basin (MRG), U.S. Study focus Long-term tradeoffs of technologically possible land and water management interventions were analyzed to adapt irrigated agriculture to growing water scarcity in a desert environment under a projected warm-dry future. Nineteen different intervention scenarios were investig...

Highlights Station aridity can cause overestimation of ET ref at weather monitoring networks in irrigated areas. Station aridity was demonstrated in a mesoscale weather monitoring network. Station aridity is amplified in water-scarce irrigated areas during droughts. Station aridity should be accounted for to achieve water conservation through weath...

Continuous groundwater (GW) extraction under the human and climate influences is making aquifers more vulnerable and unsustainable around the world. Assessing groundwater sustainability requires a deep knowledge of qualitative and quantitative status of aquifer. DRASTIC approach has been widely applied to study the qualitative status of aquifers ba...

Groundwater is a strategic resource for economic development, social justice, environmental sustainability, and water governance. The Lower Casas Grandes Basin located in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico is in a semi-arid region that has increasing groundwater demands while confronting regional challenges such as adverse climate change scenarios and...

We present Multiscale Extrapolative Learning Algorithm (MELA) as a novel artificial-intelligence (AI)-based data extrapolator. MELA is capable of extending temporally limited local hydroclimatic measurements at fine spatial resolution to longer periods, using remotely-sensed hydroclimatic data readily available for longer periods but at coarse spat...

Right after a devastating multi-year drought, a number of flood events with unprecedented spatial extent hit different parts of Iran over the 2-week period of March 17th to April 1st, 2019, causing a human disaster and substantial loss of assets and infrastructure across urban and rural areas. Here, we investigate natural (e.g., rainfall, snow accu...

This paper investigates the hydro-climatic reasons behind the desiccation of the Hamun Lakes in the Iran-Afghanistan border. We analyzed changes in the flow of the Hirmand River (90 percent of the total inflow to the lakes) at the international border, and precipitation over this river’s sub-basin during 1960–2016 by calculating standardized indice...

The growth of agricultural production systems is a major driver of groundwater depletion worldwide. Balancing groundwater supply and food production requires localized understanding of groundwater storage and depletion variations in response to diverse cropping systems and surface water availability for irrigation. While advances through Gravity Re...

Pakistan’s agriculture and food production account for 27% of its overall gross domestic product (GDP). Despite ongoing advances in technology and crop varieties, an imbalance between water availability and demand, combined with robust shifts in drought propagation has negatively affected the agro-ecosystem and environmental conditions. In this stu...

This review focuses on the use of Interpretable Artificial Intelligence (IAI) and eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) models for data imputations and numerical or categorical hydroclimatic predictions from nonlinearly combined multidimensional predictors. The AI models considered in this paper involve Extreme Gradient Boosting, Light Gradient...

The Korba region in northwestern Tunisia has a coastal aquifer that is impacted by intensive irrigation, urban expansion, and sensitivity to SWI. We assessed the vulnerability extent of Korba’s GW to SWI. We utilized a parametric model for GW vulnerability assessment, the GALDIT, which considers six parameters to determine SWI effects. The GALDIT m...

The Rio Grande/Bravo is an arid river basin shared by the United States and Mexico, the fifth-longest river in North America, and home to more than 10.4 million people. By crossing landscapes and political boundaries, the Rio Grande/Bravo brings together cultures, societies, ecosystems, and economies, thereby forming a complex social-ecological sys...

Trustworthy projections of hydrological droughts are pivotal for identifying the key hydroclimatic factors that affect future groundwater level (GWL) fluctuations in drought-prone karstic aquifers that provide water for human consumption and sustainable ecosystems. Herein, we introduce an explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) framework integrat...

Environmental flows (e‐flows) are powerful tools for sustaining freshwater biodiversity and ecosystem services, but their widespread implementation faces numerous social, political, and economic barriers. These barriers are amplified in water‐limited systems where strong trade‐offs exist between human water needs and freshwater ecosystem protection...

The complexity of pollutant-mixing mechanism in open channels generates large uncertainty in estimation of longitudinal and lateral dispersion coefficients (Kx and Ky). Therefore, Kx and Ky estimation in rivers should be accompanied by an uncertainty analysis, a subject mainly ignored in previous studies. We introduce a method based on thorough ana...

The Zayandeh-Rud River Basin in the central plateau of Iran continues to grapple with water shortages due to a water-intensive development path made possible by a primarily supply-oriented water management approach to battle the water limits to growth. Despite inter-basin water transfers and increasing groundwater supply, recurring water shortages...

Significance Iran is facing a state of water bankruptcy that threatens its socioeconomic development and natural environments. Using an exceptionally rich measured groundwater dataset, we illustrate the extent and severity of Iran’s groundwater depletion and salinization problems during the 2002 to 2015 period, when the number of groundwater extrac...

Although dimensional analysis suggests sound functional forms (FFs) to calculate longitudinal dispersion coefficient (Kx), no attempt has been made to quantify both reliability of the estimated Kx value and its sensitivity to variation of the FFs' parameters. This paper introduces a new index named bandwidths similarity factor (bws–factor) to quant...

Traditional, mainstream definitions of drought describe it as deficit in water‐related variables or water‐dependent activities (e.g., precipitation, soil moisture, surface and groundwater storage, and irrigation) due to natural variabilities that are out of the control of local decision‐makers. Here, we argue that within coupled human‐water systems...

Understanding the complexity and feedbacks among food, energy, and water (FEW) systems is key to making informed decisions about sustainable development. This paper presents qualitative representation and quantitative system dynamics simulation of the water resources system in the Qazvin Plain, Iran, taking into account the energy intensity of wate...

Reliable forecasts of water demand that account for factors that drive demand are imperative to understanding future urban water needs. The effects of meteorological dynamics and sociocultural settings are expressed weakly in many published municipal water demand models, limiting their utility for high-accuracy urban water demand modeling. To fill...

We review over twenty years of publications on Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) applications in arid/semi-arid irrigated agricultural watersheds. Our review reveals strict dominance of the model's use for better understanding water quantity aspects of water management. While this is to be expected given the reality of water scarcity and associ...

Mapping groundwater recharge zones (GWRZs) is essential for planning artificial recharge programs to mitigate groundwater decline and saltwater intrusion into coastal aquifers. We applied two multi-criteria decision-making approaches, namely the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and the multi-influencing factors (MIF), to map GWRZs in the Korba aq...

The coastal areas of Florida, United States, are exposed to increasing risk of flooding due to sea level rise as well as severe hurricanes. Florida regulations suggest constructing stormwater retention ponds as an option to retain excess runoff generated by the increased impervious area and to protect the environment by reducing pollutants from new...

Tunisia relies extensively on coastal groundwater resources that are pumped at unsustainable rates to support irrigated agriculture, causing groundwater drawdown and water quality problems due to seawater intrusion. It is imperative for the country to regulate future groundwater allocations and implement conservation strategies based on robust hydr...

We propose a probabilistic framework rooted in multivariate and copula theory to assess heavy metal hazard associated with contaminated sediment in freshwater rivers that provide crucial ecosystem services such as municipal water source, eco-tourism, and agricultural irrigation. Exploiting the dependence structure between suspended sediment concent...

Engineers face the ongoing challenge to effectively communicate for diverse purposes and audiences across multiple settings. The authors interviewed 10 practicing water resources systems engineers to collect their lived experiences of the use of water resources systems analysis in their workplaces. Thematic analysis was used to identify three key c...

This paper presents the first groundwater‒energy‒food (GEF) nexus study of Iran’s agronomic crops based on national and provincial datasets and firsthand estimates of agricultural groundwater withdrawal. We use agronomic crop production, water withdrawal, and energy consumption data to estimate groundwater withdrawal from electric-powered irrigatio...

Design and analysis of drainage systems in flexible pavements require proper understanding of the pavement’s response to the ingress of water. For the sake of simplicity, investigation of adequacy of drainage systems in flexible pavements is usually carried out assuming saturated state for the foundation layers. However, several studies have confir...

The infiltration of water from precipitation through the hot mix asphalt layers in flexible pavements can lead to significant decrease in the moduli of the underlying layers, especially the base layer. As a result, the weakened pavement structure can suffer more damage and deteriorate faster compared with the same pavement under its normal conditio...

Being the second-largest country in the Middle East, Iran has a long history of civilisation during which several dynasties have been overthrown and established and health-related structures have been reorganised. Iran has had the replacement of traditional practices with modern medical treatments, emergence of multiple pioneer scientists and physi...

By combining long-term ground-based data on water withdrawal with climate model projections, this study quantifies the compounding effects of human activities and climate change on surface water availability in Iran over the twenty-first century. Our findings show that increasing water withdrawal in Iran, due to population growth and increased agri...

This chapter discusses wastewater reuse as a strategy to cope with water shortages, highlighting the importance of community decision making for successful implementation of the strategy. A brief overview of techno-economic and social dimensions of potable reuse of treated wastewater is presented along with examples of indirect and direct wastewate...

Coarse temporal (i.e., annual) and spatial (i.e., watershed) scales camouflage water stress associated with withdrawals from surface water and groundwater sources. To address this “curse of scale”, we developed a framework to characterize water stress at different time scales and at fine spatial scales that have not been explored before. Our framew...

Interdisciplinary research is increasingly called upon to find solutions to complex sustainability problems, yet co-creating usable knowledge can be challenging. This article offers broad lessons for conducting interdisciplinary science from the South Florida Water, Sustainability, and Climate Project (SFWSC), a 5-year project funded by the U.S. Na...

This paper examines the coupled effects of weather condition, crop coverage change, and regional water management (i.e., releases from Caballo Reservoir) on hydrologic characteristics of Rincon Valley (2466 km²), a semi-arid agricultural area in New Mexico, U.S.A., using Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT). The model simulates the vertical water...

Reforms currently under way in China's electricity markets bear important implications for its decarbonization objectives. The southwestern province of Yunnan is among the provinces piloting the current iteration of power market reforms. As such, lessons from Yunnan will inform future market reform and renewable energy policies in China and potenti...

The rapid shrinkage of Lake Urmia, one of the world's largest saline lakes located in northwestern Iran, is a tragic wake-up call to revisit the principles of water resources management based on the socio-economic and environmental dimensions of sustainable development. The overarching goal of this paper is to set a framework for deriving dynamic,...

South Florida's water infrastructure and ecosystems are under pressure from socio-economic growth. Understanding the region's water resources management tradeoffs is essential for developing effective adaptation strategies to cope with emerging challenges such as climate change and sea level rise, which are expected to affect many other regions in...

Many water resources management (WRM) problems are similar in nature, and yet they continuously appear in different forms and in different geographical locations. Understanding a malfunctioning system structure is essential for developing sustainable solutions, which should be further examined using detailed quantitative models. Persistent WRM prob...

Watershed modeling facilitates informed water resources management. Understanding the magnitude and timing of hydrologic fluxes, and natural and anthropogenic processes that govern water availability is key for allocation of limited water resources to competing sectors in arid regions. In this study, soil and water assessment tool (SWAT) is applied...

This research develops an integrated methodology to determine the economic value to anglers of recreational fishery ecosystem services in Everglades National Park that could result from different water management scenarios. The study first used bio-hydrological models to link managed freshwater inflows to indicators of fishery productivity and ecos...

This study estimates economic loss from South Florida croplands when usage of agricultural irrigation water is altered. In South Florida, 78% of the total value of farm products sold is comprised of cropland products. The majority of Florida citrus and sugarcane are produced in the area, and agricultural irrigation was the largest sector of water u...

Forum papers are thought-provoking opinion pieces or essays founded in fact, sometimes containing speculation, on a civil engineering topic of general interest and relevance to the readership of the journal. The views expressed in this Forum article do not necessarily reflect the views of ASCE or the Editorial Board of the journal.

This study explores a general framework for quantifying anthropogenic influences on groundwater budget based on normalized human outflow (hout) and inflow (hin). The framework is useful for sustainability assessment of groundwater systems and allows investigating the effects of different human water abstraction scenarios on the overall aquifer regi...

The Zayandeh-Rud River basin, Iran, is projected to face spatiotemporally heterogeneous temperature increase and precipitation reduction that will decrease water supply by mid-century. With projected increase (0.70–1.03 °C) in spring temperature and reduction (6–55%) in winter precipitation, the upper Zayandeh-Rud sub-basin, the main source of rene...

This paper presents an integrated method to obtain optimal market operation and regulation with the objective of reducing the market price and increasing the electricity consumption in hydro-dominated electricity markets, in which giant cascaded hydropower facilities along different rivers are main power suppliers. To this end, a comprehensive indi...

This paper applies HEC-HMS to the Karkheh River basin (KRB), Iran, and facilitates the calibration of a continuous hydrologic model (CHM) with soil moisture accounting (SMA) and snowmelt degree-day parameters. Manual calibration was performed to ensure the physical relevance of HEC-HMS parameter values. Because manual calibration entails changing e...

The Zayandeh-Rud River basin, Iran, is projected to face spatiotemporally heterogeneous temperature increase and precipitation reduction that will decrease water supply by mid-century. With projected increase (0.70–1.03 °C) in spring temperature and reduction (6–55%) in winter precipitation, the upper Zayandeh-Rud sub-basin, the main source of rene...

Agriculture is the mainstay of economy in Malawi - the warm heart of Africa. It employs 85 % of the labour force, and produces one third of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and 90 % of foreign exchange earnings. Maize farming covers over 92 % of Malawi’s agricultural land and contributes over 54 % of national caloric intake. With a subtropical clim...

Serious environmental management games can improve understanding of practical environmental sustainability challenges by offering opportunities to obtain first-hand experiences that may be otherwise too costly, difficult or dangerous to reproduce in reality. Game-based learning (GBL) has been found to increase soft skills, such as critical thinking...

Iran is currently experiencing serious water problems. Frequent droughts coupled with over-abstraction of surface and groundwater through a large network of hydraulic infrastructure and deep wells have escalated the nation’s water situation to a critical level. This is evidenced by drying lakes, rivers and wetlands, declining groundwater levels, la...

Forum papers are thought-provoking opinion pieces or essays founded in fact, sometimes containing speculation, on a civil engineering topic of general interest and relevance to the readership of the journal. The views expressed in this Forum article do not necessarily reflect the views of ASCE or the Editorial Board of the journal.

In recent years, evolutionary techniques have been widely used to search for the global optimum of combinatorial non-linear non-convex problems. In this paper, we present a new algorithm, named fuzzy Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization (f-MOPSO) to improve conjunctive surface water and groundwater management. The f-MOPSO algorithm is simple...

South Florida’s water and environmental resources are already under pressure from socio-economic growth and declining ecosystems. The region has one of the world’s largest systems of canals, levees and water control structures to manage water resources under extreme drought and flood conditions. Emerging challenges such as sea level rise and climat...

Hydro-economic optimization modeling is applied to aid in framing a new process for managing water resources in south Florida, allowing for an explicit representation of the trade-offs between socio-economic and ecological services provided by the system. A network-based model of south Florida’s water resources system incorporates the value of wate...

Lake Urmia, one of the largest saltwater lakes on earth and a highly endangered ecosystem, is on the brink of a major environmental disaster similar to the catastrophic death of the Aral Sea. With a new composite of multi-spectral high resolution satellite observations, we show that the area of this Iranian lake has decreased by around 88% in the p...

Lake Urmia, one of the largest saltwater lakes on earth and a highly endangered ecosystem, is on the brink of a major environmental disaster similar to the catastrophic death of the Aral Sea. With a new composite of multi-spectral high resolution satellite observations, we show that the area of this Iranian lake has decreased by around 88% in the p...

Biotic homogenization, a de facto symptom of a global biodiversity crisis, underscores the urgency of reforming water resources management to focus on the health and viability of ecosystems. Global population and economic growth, coupled with inadequate investment in maintenance of ecological systems, threaten to degrade environmental integrity and...

Increasing population, rising energy demand, global warming, and energy insecurity are recognized as the main motives for the rush to expand renewable energy sources in the United States. Nevertheless, the unintended impacts on major natural resource system components such as land and water make some of the renewable energies undesirable when susta...

This study aims to evaluate climate change adaptation strategies for the Zayandeh-Rud water system located in central Iran. A probabilistic multimodel ensemble scenario is used to characterize uncertainties in climate change projections for the study period (2015-2044). The Zayandeh-Rud watershed management and sustainability model (ZRW-MSM) is run...

Systems thinking and system dynamics simulation can provide insights for developing effective plans to protect the environmental integrity of natural systems impacted by human activities. In this study, a system archetype known as growth and underinvestment is hypothesized to explain the eutrophication problem of Lake Allegan in Michigan and identi...

To address severe water stress in the Zayandeh-Rud River Basin in central Iran, a number of inter-basin water transfer projects have been implemented that have more than doubled the natural flow of the river. This study aims to evaluate the reliability of inter-basin water transfer as a long-term solution to meet the growing water demand in this ba...

Early water resources modeling efforts were aimed mostly at representing hydrologic processes, but the need for interdisciplinary studies has led to increasing complexity and integration of environmental, social, and economic functions. The gradual shift from merely employing engineering-based simulation models to applying more holistic frameworks...