The effect of climate change on surface and groundwater resources in Rozeh Tea Plain

Freshwater is a vulnerable, limited, and vital resource. Today, the increasing global population and declining water resources are one of the most important challenges facing mankind. Water resources can directly affect socio-economic growth and development, they can serve as the foundation for development activities.One of the most important issues of the current century is the issue of global warming, which is exacerbated by the impact of greenhouse gases and is expected to cause changes in climate variables. The purpose of this study was to investigate the changes in surface water flow and groundwater level in the Razavachai plain of West Azarbaijan province. Accordingly, IHACRES runoff rainfall model and artificial neural network were used. For this purpose, precipitation data, mean temperature, surface water flow of Rozhay-Chai River and groundwater level of the region were used. In the present study, using the ACCESS1_0 model, the fifth report under climate scenarios 4.5 and 8.5, temperature and precipitation variations in two periods (2020–2052), (2053–2085) were investigated. The results showed that in the region the temperature changes under RCP8.5 scenario were higher than the RCP4.5 scenario and the precipitation decreased in the expected months. The rainfall-runoff model performed better in predicting the flow of the Rozhachai River in the base period than in the next period and showed a correlation coefficient greater than 0.5. The model performed better in baseline prediction of groundwater level with artificial neural network. Finally, in the distant future, the effects of greenhouse gases have a stronger signal and increase temperatures and reduce precipitation.