Prediction of Urmia Lake Water-Level Fluctuations by Using Analytical, Linear Statistic and Intelligent Methods

Undoubtedly, the most significant factor with wise decision making and designing hydrological structures along the lake coasts is an accurate model of lake level changes. This issue becomes more and more important as recent global climate changes have completely reformed the behavior of traditional lake level fluctuations. Subsequently, estimating lake levels becomes more important and at the same time more difficult. This paper deals with modeling lake level changes of Lake Urmia located in north-west of Iran, in terms of both simulator and predictor models. According to this, two traditional simulator models based on water budget are developed which benefit from most effective components on water budget namely precipitation, evaporation, inflow and the lake level antecedents, as model inputs. Most famous linear modeling tools, Autoregressive with exogenous input (ARX) and Box-Jenkins (BJ) models are employed with the same mentioned inputs for prediction purpose. In addition, two other methods that are, Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) neural network and also Local Linear Neuro-Fuzzy (LLNF) are applied to investigate capability of intelligent nonlinear methods for lake level changes prediction. All models performances are indicated using both graph and numerical illustrations and results are discussed. Comparative results reveal that the intelligent methods are superior to traditional models for modeling lake level behavior as complex hydrological phenomena.