Upswing in Precipitation Raises Water Levels in Iranian Reservoirs

Officials announced that recent rainfalls in Iran have increased average precipitation for the water year in the country, raising water levels in dam reservoirs across the country.

Head of Iran’s Water Resources Management Company (WRM) Mohammad Hajrasouliha said on Thursday that recent rainfalls beginning Monday and ending Wednesday increased the average peak to 172 millimeters from 165 millimeters recorded over the last water year in Iran.

Hajrasouliha said the rainfall affected major provinces in south, center and north of the country, including the province surrounding the capital Tehran.

Seyed Hossein Razavi, a local WRM official in Tehran, said that the two-day rains increased water levels in reservoirs of the province by two million cubic meters.

Razavi added that water levels in main reservoirs in Tehran were currently around 610 million cubic meters, 25 million cubic meters higher compared with the previous year.

He said that average precipitation in February in Tehran was nearly double the yearly figure.

Iran has seen years of dry spell before embracing waves of heavy rainfall in March.

That comes as the storage in water reservoirs has always been seen as a major factor for the country’s economic growth and agricultural output.

Late in November, Iran’s Ministry of Energy announced that heavy precipitation in the fall had been unprecedented in the last 51 years, adding that the volume of water behind dams across the country was then 26% more than what the figures showed a year earlier.

The total volume of water held currently behind dams across Iran was 25.4 billion cubic meters (bcm), a 26-percent year-on-year increase, said the news service of the Ministry of Energy Paven.ir, adding that 50 percent of the total capacity of the dams was empty compared to the 59-percent reported between September and October 2019.

The report said that precipitation as of 21 September, 2019, which marks the beginning of Iran’s water year, until 22 November had been more than 42 millimeters on average, adding that the figure represented a 23-percent increase year-on-year compared to the past 51 years.