study of climate change impact on water resources allocation in maragheh plain using weap model

The appropriate water resources planning and management is very important due to the critical status of water all around the world and the ever-increasing need for water in each country. over the past few decades, due to the climate changes and the weakness of integrated water resources management and neglecting the country's sustainable development, the water resources in iran has been faced great challenges. the main purpose of this study is to examine the impact of climate changes on supply to demands in various sectors of agriculture, urban, and industry in four regions downstream of the alavian dam, maragheh, iran. for this purpose, the lars-wg model was calibrated to create the future data for the maragheh synoptic station. then, among the 14 gcm models in the lars-wg model, the ipslcm 4 model under the a1b scenario was selected as the most suitable model for the climate simulation of the study area by using r2, mae and rmse indices. in the next step, weap model was run for producing a reference scenario and providing information on climate changes in the future. the maximum and minimum annual temperatures during the years 2020-2040 is accompanied by an increase of about 1 ᵒc. in other words, the region climate is moving towards increasing in the temperature. the changes in monthly precipitation did not show a general increasing or decreasing trend. the results of this study also showed that the negative effects of climate change may intensify the tensions and water scarcity with an increase in exploitation of groundwater resources. the results showed as the water resources in the study area is assigned to the urban, industrial and agricultural sectors, the needs for the urban and industrial sectors at the future are completely met and water resource indices did not change under the effect of climate change. while the agricultural sector may encounter to water scarcity and may be damaged by climate changes, as compared with urban and industrial sectors.