Urban Catchment Management

This paper presents the results of a study which aimed to develop a Decision Support System (DSS) to support municipal agencies in its activities of urban water management. The DSS is composed of a data bank linked to simulation models and to output reports. The system can deal with three major aspects of urban water: hydrology, hydraulic of the main streams and water quality due to non point pollution. The DSS was developed for a small urban basin located in São Paulo city, the biggest city of the south hemisphere, Cabuçu de Baixo river basin. In order to obtain the basic information a set of field monitoring campaigns were conducted in the last three years involving hydrology and water quality measurements. It is important to point out the importance of this field work due to the lack of this kind of information for urban catchments mainly in a poor mega polluted city like São Paulo. In parallel to the DSS development a remote sensing study was necessary to analyze the urbanization and its impacts in the soil covering, hydrology and water quality. Finally the DSS was written in way that urban managers can use it for management activities without full knowledge of technical details of water simulation modeling.