Sharif Digital Repository

Understanding of how anthropogenic droughts occur in socio-hydrological systems is critical in studying resilience of these systems. This is especially relevant when a “lock-in” toward watershed desiccation occurs as an emergent outcome of coupling among social dynamics and surface and underground water processes. How the various processes collectively fit together to reinforce such a lock-in and what may be a critical or ignored feedback worsening the state of the socio-hydrological systems remains poorly understood. Here we tackle this gap by focusing on the case of Lake Urmia in Iran, a saline lake that faces the same fate as that of Aral Sea due to over-extraction of water sources that... 

Clay liners are widely used as porous membrane barriers to control solute transport and to prevent the leakage of leachate both in horizontal and vertical flow scenarios, such as the isolated base and ramps of sanitary landfills. Despite the primary importance of saturated hydraulic conductivity in a reliable simulation of fluid flow through clay barriers, there is no model to predict hydraulic conductivity of clayey soils permeated with saline aqueous solutions because most of the current models were developed for pure water. Therefore, the main motivation behind this study is to derive semi-empirical models for simulating the hydraulic conductivity of clayey soils in the presence of...