Investigating Urmia Lake Partial Restoration and Ecological Water Level Using MOHID-2D Water Hydrodynamic Model

Lake Urmia as the third extremely-largest salty lake in the world (Garousi et al. 2013), owing to its unique natural and ecological importance, has been considering as a National Park (Abbaspour and Nazaridoust, 2007), Ramsar Site ( Ramsar Convention, ) and UNESCO Biosphere Reserve ( UNESCO Bioephere Reserves, ). Artemia poses of the most important halophytic shrimp species that lives in the lake and no flora other than phytoplankton is found within the lake (Sima Tajrishy, 2013). Four major islands situating in the south of the lake are either protected areas, or the destinations for diverse migratory birds including flamingos, pelicans, spoonbills, storks and gulls. More recently, the lake has been highly regarded due to its drying up caused by emerging drought, low rainfall, as well as decreased rivers flow feeding the lake. So that, the lake with different environmental, economic and tourism functions is now being died out and it experiences one of its most critical condition in the recent decades. The UNEP2 in its Global Environmental Alert Services (GEAS) bulletin dated February 2012, declared the status of the lake as “alarming,” which requires attention and immediate actions to avoid environmental catastrophe. Based on the conducted studies over the last decades (Abbaspour and Nazaridoust, 2007; Sima and Tajrishy, 2013),