Hoori Ajami

Professor of Groundwater Hydrology at the UCR

Palm Desert, California

November 13th, 2025

Sitting in a half circle of tables arranged in a U-shape, we met with Professor Hoori Ajami in a classroom on the Palm Desert campus of the University of California Riverside. As a professor in the Environmental Sciences department, her research primarily centers around catchment hydrology and spatial analyses. Considering that about half of the goods produced globally are produced through irrigated agriculture, Professor Ajami is particularly interested in agroecosystems, like the Imperial Valley and Coachella Valley surrounding the Salton Sea. The Salton Sea exists because of human action and, due to its nature as a closed basin, is gradually becoming saltier every year, especially as flows into the lake are decreasing. Most recently, Ajami’s research has been dedicated to determining why the Salton Sea has declined by almost 30% in area in only the past 30 years. With 90% of the input to the sea coming from agricultural runoff and only 10% from precipitation and groundwater, their initial theory of climate change being a driving factor turned out to be less important than they thought. After extensive research, assessment, and hydrologic modeling, they determined the declining lake level is primarily due to a drop in surface level inflows.

Farming in the Imperial Valley requires a ton of water from the Colorado River. Overall, as farmers have increased their agricultural efficiency, flows from the valley to the Salton Sea have gone down and the sea has shrunk. In terms of agricultural runoff, farmers have become more efficient with their water usage meaning there is less water being overapplied to fields, resulting in less evapotranspiration, and less draining to the agricultural sump that is the Salton Sea. In a lot of ways, the Salton Sea and Imperial valley are a mess, but Professor Ajami tells us she is still optimistic for the future. The challenge of trying to solve and learn from these problems is what keeps her hopeful, and while there still may be no clear solution, we can at least try to manage the symptoms of the world we do have and work together to mitigate these massive issues.

by Allee Garver