Evaluation of Methods for Representing Urban Terrain in Storm-Water Modeling
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 15, Issue 1
Abstract
Many storm-water modeling problems consider watersheds comprised of complex flow networks including surfaces, streets, pipes, and channels. Ideally, hydrologic methods would be used to model the accumulation of runoff on surfaces while hydraulic methods would be used to explicitly model the flow in each street, pipe, and channel. In many practical circumstances, only the largest pipes and channels are explicitly modeled with hydraulic methods. Thus, most subcatchments include numerous streets and small pipes that can affect the accumulation and movement of flow. Digital elevation models (DEMs) are widely used to determine geometric characteristics of these subcatchments, but street gutters and pipes are not resolved in such data. To overcome this problem, known streets and pipes are often “burned” into the surface by reducing the local elevations by a specified amount before calculating flow paths and the associated subcatchment characteristics. In this paper, existing and proposed methods for including these conduits into DEM surfaces are evaluated. The results suggest that the derived characteristics are sensitive to the selected method. We also find that a new method, which makes use of known pipe elevations, is most successful at reproducing realistic flow paths. Finally, we find that errors in the implied watershed characteristics are difficult to overcome by calibration of other model parameters.
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Acknowledgments
The writers thank the city of Nantes, France, for providing the GIS data (Nantes–Métropole 2003). The writers thank also Dr. John Labadie (Colorado State University) for his help in using Arc GIS and Arc Hydro. This research was made possible by the support of Region Pays de la Loire (Project MEIGEVILLE), and the generous financial support from the Harold H. Short endowed fund for the Civil Infrastructure System Laboratory at Colorado State University.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 15 • Issue 1 • January 2010
Pages: 1 - 14
Copyright
© 2010 ASCE.
History
Received: Nov 23, 2008
Accepted: Apr 30, 2009
Published online: May 2, 2009
Published in print: Jan 2010
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