Flow-Regime Management at the Urban Land-Parcel Scale: Test of Feasibility
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 20, Issue 12
Abstract
Overcoming the hydrologic shortcomings of conventional approaches to stormwater management requires the protection or restoration of flow regimes at small scales. A better understanding of how stormwater management strategies can achieve this aim is needed. This study modeled 28,800 design configurations of a typical stormwater management strategy at the scale of urban land parcels across a range of urban densities and climatic conditions. Realistic design configurations that achieved three hydrologic response targets were identified as part of this modeling. It was found that meeting the targets required a combination of stormwater harvesting (using tanks) and infiltration (using rain gardens). This was possible primarily because the amount of harvested impervious roof runoff made a large contribution to a hydrologic target, which measured the ability to restore volumetric losses. Management of flow regimes at small scales will require policy mechanisms that necessitate both stormwater harvesting and infiltration. Urban design challenges remain to ensure that such approaches can be incorporated into the urban landscape in a way that maximizes the benefits to humans and to the environment. Future research is also required to investigate how the use of small-scale stormwater management strategies can improve catchment-scale flow regimes.
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Acknowledgments
Peter Roberts is thanked for the provision of demand data. Blair Bethwaite from the Monash eResearch Centre provided technical assistance with executing our models over a computational grid. Hugh Duncan is thanked for various discussions concerning the rain-garden model. Fletcher is supported by an ARC Future Fellowship (FT100100144) while Walsh is supported by funding from Melbourne Water. This project was undertaken in association with an Australian Research Council Linkage Project (LP0883610) and with the “Cities as Water Supply Catchments” Program (now part of the CRC for Water Sensitive Cities).
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Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 20 • Issue 12 • December 2015
Copyright
© 2015 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Aug 5, 2013
Accepted: Mar 19, 2014
Published online: Mar 21, 2014
Discussion open until: Oct 14, 2015
Published in print: Dec 1, 2015
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