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Evaluating Benefits of LID Practices at Multiple Spatial Scales Using SUSTAIN
Citation:
ZHEN, J. X., J. Riverson, L. Shoemaker, AND F. LAI. Evaluating Benefits of LID Practices at Multiple Spatial Scales Using SUSTAIN. Presented at EWRI 2008 WORLD ENVIRONMENTAL & WATER RESOURCES CONGRESS, HONOLULU, HI, May 13 - 16, 2008.
Impact/Purpose:
to present information
Description:
Low impact development (LID) is a storm water management approach that essentially mimics the way nature works: infiltrate, filter, store, evaporate, and detain runoff close to its source. LID practices are distributed in nature, and they work on decentralized micro-scales and mitigate storm water through small landscape features at lot levels. Since 2003, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been developing a decision support system for placement of best management practices (BMPs) to assist stormwater management professionals in planning for BMPs implementation at strategic locations in urban watersheds. The system is called System for Urban Stormwater Treatment and Analysis INtegration (SUSTAIN). It will help develop, evaluate, select, and place BMP options, including LID practices, based on cost and effectiveness. SUSTAIN includes an explicit BMP simulation module that has the capability of simulating individual LID practices. At a small scale (site or local), the explicit simulation approach can be sufficiently applied to evaluate the benefits of each individual LID sites. However, at a larger scale (e.g., watershed scale), there are often hundreds, even thousands of LID units scattered throughout the landscape. This poses a challenge in evaluating the collective benefits of distributed LID units. The required simulations and cost comparisons of these distributed BMP options place significant burden on the computational accuracy and simulation time for system modeling. Therefore SUSTAIN provides a practical means for representing distributed BMPs at a larger scale in order to minimize computational effort. This paper will describe the procedures for evaluating the effectiveness of LID practices at various spatial scales. Selected examples will be provided to demonstrate the approach.