APEC Climate Center (APCC) will participate in a “pilot project for Developing Smart Water Monitoring Software in Khuzestan, Iran,” which is supported by Korea Rural Community Corporation (KRC), to help resolve water shortage problems in Iran.

Recently, there has been severe extreme heat and drought events in the Khuzestan region of Southern Iran, making water shortage solutions urgently necessary.

To address this, the Korea Rural Community Corporation (KRC) and Khuzestan Hydropower Plants Installation & Maintenance Company (KHPIMC) signed a ‘contract for a pilot project for Developing Smart Water Monitoring Software (SWMS) in Khuzestan, Iran’. The purposes of this contract are the establishment of infrastructure needed to make an integrated and comprehensive database for monitoring and processing all data of watersheds simultaneously and creating a decision support system for water resources management in Khuzestan. This project will take place from September, 2017 to August, 2018 with a budget of three billion KRW.

The APEC Climate Center (APCC) will be in charge of providing and sharing knowledge and experience that the center has been building in the climate forecasting field to contribute to the water shortage problem in Iran. In particular, these include six main activities where APCC will

i. verify the reliability of the APCC MME forecast skill over the 5 main river basins in Khuzestan;

ii. provide a gridded observation dataset of precipitation, maximum temperature, and minimum temperature covering five sub-river basins;

iii. divide the Climate Zone for the five sub river basins using clustering analysis, spatial-temporal variability analysis, and analysis on precipitation and temperature;

iv. perform spatial and temporal downscaling for the production of seasonal forecasts reflecting observed precipitation and temperature and topographic characteristics;

v. develop a drought early warning system prototype for the five sub-river basins; and

vi. organize training workshops specifically for that component in Iran. The purposes of this training are to build relevant staff’s capacity for the system operation and maintenance and to secure project sustainability.