Abstract
The snow-fed river basins of the Near East region are facing an urgent threat in the form of declining water resources. In this study, we analyzed several remote sensing products (optical, passive microwave, and gravimetric) and outputs of a meteorological reanalysis data set to understand the relationship between the terrestrial water storage anomalies and the mountain snowpack. The results from different satellite retrievals show a clear signal of a depletion of both water storage and the seasonal snowpack in four basins in the region. We find a strong reduction in terrestrial water storage over the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) observational period, particularly over the higher elevations. Snow-cover duration estimates from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) products point towards negative and significant trends up to one month per decade in the current era. These numbers are a clear indicator of the partial disappearance of the seasonal snow-cover in the region which has been projected to occur by the end of the century. The spatial patterns of changes in the snow-cover duration are positively correlated with both GRACE terrestrial water storage decline and peak snow water equivalent (SWE) depletion from the ERA5 reanalysis. Possible drivers of the snowpack depletion are a significant reduction in the snowfall ratio and an earlier snowmelt. A continued depletion of the montane snowpack in the Near East paints a bleak picture for future water availability in this water-stressed region.
Highlights
The Near East region that encompasses the Fertile Crescent, often referred to as the cradle of civilization, has long been a center of agricultural activity
As for AMSR-E, which is projected in the Equal-Area Scalable Earth (EASE) grid with irregular geographic coordinates, for each grid cell we search for all the SRTM30 grid cells that fall within this cell and average these to obtain an aggregated AMSR-E digital elevation model (DEM)
We perform a statistical analysis of the previously described time varying remotely sensed spatial data related to the snowpack, namely: Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) terrestrial water storage (TWS), AMSR-E snow water equivalent (SWE), AMSR2 SWE, and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) snow-cover duration (SCD) from both Aqua and trends for MODIS SCD from Aqua (Terra)
Summary
The Near East region that encompasses the Fertile Crescent, often referred to as the cradle of civilization, has long been a center of agricultural activity. Ezber [25] used the outputs of future CORDEX simulations [26] to show a significant shift in precipitation seasonality over the Black Sea region and southeastern Anatolia All these studies point towards the Near East being a region that is especially vulnerable to climate change. Rodell et al [36] estimated a decrease in total water storage of around 32.1 ± 1.5 Gt yr−1 for the northern Middle East region which includes eastern Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria They claimed that a large negative trend occurred because of groundwater depletion and drought which are categorized as a “possible or partial direct human impact”. Both the temporal trends in the individual data sets and correlations between them are considered in the analysis
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