Hydrologic Footprint Residence: Environmentally Friendly Criteria for Best Management Practices
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 17, Issue 1
Abstract
The natural hydrologic flow regime is altered by urbanization, which can be mitigated through best management practices (BMPs) or low impact development (LID). Typically, the effectiveness of different management scenarios is tested by comparing post- and predevelopment instantaneous peak flows. This approach, however, does not capture the extent of hydrologic change and the effect on downstream communities. A new hydrologic sustainability metric is presented here to quantify the impact of urbanization on downstream water bodies on the basis of the inundation dynamics of the flow regime. The hydrologic footprint residence (HFR) is designed to capture both temporal and spatial hydrological changes to an event-based flow regime by calculating the inundated areas and duration of a flood. The HFR is demonstrated for a hypothetical watershed and a watershed on the Texas A&M University Campus, located in College Station, Texas. For the campus watershed, three design storms (2-, 10-, and 100-year) and a set of historical events (during the period 1978–2009) are simulated for various management scenarios, representing predevelopment conditions, development on campus, BMP-based control, and LID-based control. The results indicate that the HFR can better capture alterations to the shape of the hydrograph compared with the use of the peak flow only.
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Acknowledgments
Although the research described in this article has been funded wholly or in part by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency through Grant UNSPECIFIED#SU833944, it has not been subjected to the Agency’s required peer and policy review and therefore does not necessarily reflect the views of the Agency and no official endorsement should be inferred.
The authors express their thanks and appreciation to the Texas A&M University Physical Plant, Engineering Design Services (TAMU PP/EDS), Gary Struzick of Klotz Associates, and Anthony Holder of AECOM, for their help and sharing of valuable storm-water, rainfall, survey, and database information. This additional information was gathered in a separate project funded by Texas A&M University Utilities, College Station, Texas, and managed by TAMU PP/EDS.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 17 • Issue 1 • January 2012
Pages: 99 - 108
Copyright
© 2012 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jul 8, 2010
Accepted: Mar 31, 2011
Published online: Apr 2, 2011
Published in print: Jan 1, 2012
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