Examining the Effect of Salt Dust Storms of Lake Urmia on Vegetation

Abstract

Urmia Lake is one of the largest saline lakes in the world, which has greatly decreased in recent years. It has created many dangers and concerns especially concerning salt dust in its arid areas. Therefore, this research aimed to investigate the relationship between vegetation and dust in the cities around Lake Urmia. For this purpose, first, using MODIS images and NDVI index, changes in the vegetation of the region in 2010 to 2020 were determined, and then, using the MERRA-2 database, the dust concentration was extracted for the mentioned years. The results showed that the mean NDVI in the study area follows a steady trend with a total mean of 0.2957 and sometimes increases or decreases due to the influence of external factors such as dust. Accordingly, the highest rate (0.3495) of the average NDVI is related to 2018 and the lowest rate (0.2579) is related to 2013. Furthermore, to investigate the relationship between vegetation and dust, two methods of linear and logarithmic regression were used. Based on linear regression (0.7703) and logarithmic (0.7153), the findings showed that the highest determination coefficient between the two indicators was in May.

Keywords

• salt dust
• vegetation
• modis
• merra-2
• lake urmia