What is it about?

Stormwater collects after a rain storm and can cause floods and polluted water. To try and combat these problems, stormwater engineers have built lots of different types of structures to capture stormwater -- green roofs, ponds, wetlands and others. Some structures are better at evaporation, some are better at infiltration. Others act as holding tanks and release surface water back to streams. We used a new tool called the "Water Budget Triangle" to try to compare these structures and understand how they change the amount of water on the surface of the land.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Lots of previous green infrastructure research has focused on only one type of structure; for example, there are a lot of case studies comparing green roofs against other green roofs. However, there was not so much information about how different structures compare with each other. Our new method is simple and allows someone who is thinking about building a stormwater management structure to compare different options and choose the right one for them. This study also begins to look at design factors that cause different types of systems to behave similarly.

Perspectives

This paper was written to try to improve communication between people who work in different stormwater sectors -- engineers, hydrologists, landscape architects, environmental scientists, and policy makers. I hope that you will find it helpful and use it to talk to others about stormwater management.

Caitlin Eger
Syracuse University

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Hydrologic processes that govern stormwater infrastructure behaviour, Hydrological Processes, November 2017, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/hyp.11353.
You can read the full text:

Read

Resources

Contributors

The following have contributed to this page