Prof. Dr. Hamid Reza Khalesifard, Institute for Advanced Studies in Basic Sciences (IASBS), Zanjan, Iran

Library, A.2.500, Staudtstr. 2

Location details

Abstract:

The Iran plateau is located over the Earth dust belt and Northwest of Iran is a mountainous semiarid region with average annual precipitation of ~300 mm/y. This region is under the impacts of large dust sources like the Mesopotamia, Arabian Desert, and African Sahara. But during the past decades, due to mismanagement of water resources and increases of irrigated agriculture, new dust sources are appeared in the region. These includes dried lakes, dried marshlands, and subsidence of the farmlands.

In this talk I will talk about LiDAR measurements over the Urmia Lake, a hypersaline lake in Northwest Iran and investigating of dust layers via an aerosol LiDAR in Zanjan (a city in Northwest Iran) that may have raised from the north of Dasht-e-Kavir desert in center of the Iran plateau. Using the recorded polarized LiDAR signals, in the former we have been able to specify the salt and salt-dust particles that are raising form the dried bed of the lake and its costal area. The latter work shows considerable increase in the dust events that are originating from the central Iran plateau. These sources are spatially correlated with the regions that had experienced land subsidence.