Preservation of Watershed Regime for Low-Impact Development through Detention
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 15, Issue 1
Abstract
Low-impact development (LID) allows for greater development potential with less environmental impacts using on-site distributed storm-water controls that achieve a good balance among conservation, growth, ecosystem protection, and public safety. The qualitative statement of the ultimate goal for LID can serve as guidance for engineering designs, but it is inadequate for comparison and selection among the innovative alternatives. This paper presents an innovative method by which the long-term runoff statistics are employed as the basis to quantify the impact of the development on the watershed hydrologic regime. In this study, the standard LID detention volume is defined by the storm-water storage volume required to preserve the predevelopment mean and standard deviation for runoff volume population. Consequently, a detention basin is considered oversized if the after-detention runoff volume population has a lower mean flow while the undersized counterpart produces a mean runoff volume higher than that under the predevelopment condition. This simple but quantifiable method is very useful for detention alternative comparisons, and can serve as a guide to retrofit an existing detention basin, according to the proposed LID initiative.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 15 • Issue 1 • January 2010
Pages: 15 - 19
Copyright
© 2010 ASCE.
History
Received: Oct 12, 2008
Accepted: May 6, 2009
Published online: May 8, 2009
Published in print: Jan 2010
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