Books

Mazandaran — a climate atlas, every number computed from open data; and a chapter on the climate of Central Asia, open access at Springer.

Cover of the book Mazandaran: the snow-covered cone of Damavand rising above a cloud layer at dawn, under a deep blue sky.

Mazandaran — a climate atlas

B. Fallah · Zenodo, version 2.0.0 · 48 pages, 170 × 240 mm

Download the PDF — 23 MB Zenodo record

Mazandaran is the province I am from: a strip of Iran between the Caspian, which is the largest lake on earth, and the Alborz, which carries a 5,600-metre volcano. A European reader tends to picture Iran as desert. The book answers that with arithmetic rather than protest — Ramsar takes 1,238 mm of rain a year on 89 rain days, against Hamburg's 771 mm on 188; two thirds of the province lies above 500 m; and the forest on its slopes held beech, oak, elm and hornbeam through the last glacial, while Europe was steppe and tundra.

Every number printed on a plate was computed from open data by the pipeline published with the book, and stored with the method that produced it. Every claim that is not a number resolves to a source with a retrieval date. Ninety acceptance checks run on each build, and the one that still fails is named on the last page instead of hidden. Where the data cannot answer, the book says so: all four rain gauges in the province sit at sea level, so above 500 m the rainfall map is a model no gauge has checked, and the plate says that.

Text, maps and design CC BY 4.0; the code MIT; the two photographs under the Unsplash License and not sub-licensable. Free to read, translate and reprint, with credit.

Cover of the book Towards Sustainable Future of Central Asia: yurts on a green summer pasture below snow-capped mountains, the title in white on dark green.

Climate Change in Central Asia and Expected Impacts

B. Fallah · Chapter 2 in: I. Didovets, V. Krysanova, F. F. Hattermann, A. Gafurov (eds.), Towards Sustainable Future of Central Asia: Analysis of Climate, Resources and Human Security · Springer Nature, Advances in Global Change Research 84 · pp. 21–47 · open access

Download the chapter PDF — open access Chapter at Springer

Central Asia warms faster than the planet. The chapter sets out why — a continental interior far from any ocean, with mountains that amplify the warming with height — and what the record already shows: surface air temperature about 1.2 °C above the pre-industrial baseline, and under the high-emission pathway SSP5-8.5 a rise approaching 6 °C by the end of the century. The projections rest on 442 CMIP6 simulations, downscaled to the region with a neural network.

The second half is about what that heat does to water. The glaciers of the Tien Shan have lost about 27 % of their mass since 1961, and 22 million people downstream depend on the meltwater they buffer; roughly 80 million live on the balance between glacial melt and river flow. Extremes that were rare are no longer: multi-year droughts have become seven times more frequent, and in 2024 rapid snowmelt on saturated soil flooded Kazakhstan and displaced 118,000 people. The chapter is open access, as is the whole volume.

Open access under CC BY 4.0 — free to read, share and adapt, with credit. Chapter 2 of a volume on climate, water and human security in Central Asia, edited by I. Didovets, V. Krysanova, F. F. Hattermann and A. Gafurov.