Elmira Hassanzadeh

Global Institute for Water Security

Urmia Lake in Iran is the second largest saline lake in the world. This ecosystem is the home for different species. Due to various socio-economical and ecological criteria, Urmia Lake has important role in the Northwestern part of the country but it has faced many problems in recent years. Because of droughts, overuse of surface water resources an...

The Congo River Basin is the second-largest watershed globally, flowing through nine countries before reaching the Atlantic Ocean. The Kasai River Basin (KARB), containing about one-fourth of Congo’s freshwater resources, plays a strategic role in sustaining navigation, food production, and hydroelectricity generation in Central Africa. This study...

Agricultural best management practices (BMPs) are often implemented to reduce nutrient transport from farmland to downstream waterbodies. However, under the scenario of a changing climate, nutrient transport processes may be altered and BMPs may not be as effective. Using an ensemble of downscaled climate projections under moderate and high radiati...

This study assesses the impact of climate change on streamflow characteristics in the Lualaba River Basin (LRB), an important yet ungauged watershed in the Congo River Basin. Two conceptual hydrological models, HBV-MTL and GR4J, were calibrated using the reanalysis datasets and outputs of Generalized Circulation Models (GCMs) under CMIP6 during the...

The Congo River Basin is the second-largest watershed globally, flowing through nine countries before reaching the Atlantic Ocean. The Kasai River Basin (KARB), containing about one-fourth of Congo’s freshwater resources, plays a strategic role in sustaining navigation, food production, and hydroelectricity generation in Central Africa. A multi-mod...

Assessing the impact of climate change on water systems often requires employing a hydrological model to estimate streamflow. However, the choice of hydrological model, process representation, input data resolution, and catchment discretization can potentially influence such analyses. This study aims to evaluate the sensitivity of climate change im...

This paper represents a streamflow prediction model with the approach of ensemble multi-GCM downscaling and system dynamics (SD) for the Aji-Chay watershed located in northwest Iran. In this study, firstly, the precipitation and temperature projection for the future was assessed according to the climate change impact using a statistical downscaling...

This study presents a lake bed elevation model of Lake Urmia. In the course of model generation, a time series of the extent of the lake surface was derived from 129 satellite images with different acquisition dates based on the Landsat sensors Thematic Mapper (TM), Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+), and Operational Land Imager (OLI). Due to the...

Identification of integrated models is still hindered by submodels’ uncertainty propagation. In this article, a novel identifiability and identification framework is applied to screen and establish reasonable hypotheses of an integrated instream (WASP) and catchment water quality (VENSIM) model. Using the framework, the models were linked, and crit...

Changes in climate are altering the historical characteristics of the streamflow regime and affecting the performance of water systems. Here, the role of representing natural streamflow conditions on quantification of water system vulnerability under changing climate is evaluated in the Oldman River Basin, Canada. Four hydrological models are devel...

Floods are among the most dangerous and destructive hazards in the world. Stormwater Beneficial Management Practices (BMPs) are a set of strategies that can assist in reducing urban floods and their damages by capturing surface runoff and promoting infiltration. Engagement of citizens in the selection of stormwater BMPs may facilitate the decision-...

Nutrient export from agricultural areas is among the main contributors to water pollution in various watersheds. Agricultural Beneficial Management Practices (BMPs) are commonly used to reduce excessive nutrient runoff and improve water quality. The successful uptake of BMPs not only depends on their effectiveness but also on their costs of impleme...

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...

There is growing interest to develop processes for creating user-informed watershed scale models of hydrology and water quality and to assist in decision-making for balanced policies for managing watersheds. Watershed models can be enhanced with the incorporation of social dimensions of watershed management as brought forward by participants such a...

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 change...

Water resource systems are under unprecedented pressure mainly due to rapid socio-economic growth, weak water and land management decisions, as well as variability and change in climate conditions. These pressures have disrupted the functionality of freshwater ecosystems and have generated water management challenges in various regions across the g...

Water resource systems are under enormous pressures globally. To diagnose and quantify potential vulnerabilities, effective modeling tools are required to represent the interactions between water availability, water demands and their natural and anthropogenic drivers across a range of spatial and temporal scales. Despite significant progresses, sys...

Local characteristics of extreme rainfall quantiles, manifested through Intensity-Duration-Frequency (IDF) curves, are key to infrastructure design. Due to climate change, rainfall extremes are subject to changes, it is, therefore, crucial to explore the potential impacts these changes will have on design storms. A new strain of methodologies, quan...

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...

Water quality is increasingly at risk due to nutrient pollution entering river systems from cities, industrial zones and agricultural areas. Agricultural activities are typically the largest non-point source of water pollution. The dynamics of agricultural impacts on water quality are complex and stem from the decisions and activities of multiple s...

Water quality has been under unprecedented pressure over the past few decades due, in part, to increasing nutrient pollution from cities, industrial zones and agricultural areas entering river systems. The dynamics of these impacts on water quality are complex and stem from decisions and activities of different groups of stakeholders, who can have...

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,...

System Dynamics (SD) modeling is well adapted to developing participatory environmental models. However, SD models are ill-suited for complex physical (e.g., groundwater) processes, and existing methods to couple them with physically-based models tend to be complex and inflexible. We here present Tinamit, a novel tool to couple SD and physically-ba...

Model coupling is a crucial step to constructing many environmental models, as it allows for the integration of independently-built models representing different system sub-components to simulate the entire system. Model coupling has been of particular interest in combining socioeconomic System Dynamics (SD) models, whose visual interface facilitat...

Future climate change and anthropogenic interventions can alter historical streamflow conditions and consequently degrade the health and biodiversity of freshwater ecosystems. Future ecohydrological threats, however, are difficult to quantify using the cascade of climate and hydrological models due to various uncertainties involved. This study inst...

Long-term water resource management requires the capacity to evaluate alternative management options in the face of various sources of uncertainty in the future conditions of water resource systems. This study proposes a generic framework for determining the relative change in probabilistic characteristics of system performance as a result of chang...

A warming climate and land management intensification have altered water supply characteristics in many regions of the world. Incorporation of water supply uncertainties into long-term water resources planning and management is, therefore, significant from both a scientific and societal perspective. This study proposes a set of analyses for integra...

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...

Using a system dynamics approach, an integrated water resources system model is developed for scenario analysis of the Saskatchewan portion of the transboundary Saskatchewan River Basin in western Canada. The water resources component is constructed by emulating an existing Water Resources Management Model. Enhancements include an irrigation sub-mo...

Intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) curves are commonly used in engineering planning and design. Considering the possible effects of climate change on extreme precipitation, it is crucial to analyze potential variations in IDF curves. This paper presents a quantile-based downscaling framework to update IDF curves using the projections of future prec...

The Saskatchewan River Delta (SRD), located at the Saskatchewan/Manitoba border, is a flat area of low elevation with a complex series of water environments consisting of river channels, lakes and wetlands that have important ecological and cultural value. This region is affected by an accumulation of effects of water diversion and extraction occur...

The Saskatchewan River is the key water resource for the 3 prairie provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba in Western Canada, and thus it is necessary to pursue long-term regional and watershed-based planning for the river basin. The water resources system is complex because it includes multiple components, representing various demand secto...