You are here:
U.S. EPA's Watershed Management Research Activities
Citation:
TAFURI, A. N. AND R. I. FIELD. U.S. EPA's Watershed Management Research Activities. Presented at The National Taiwan University 2008 International Workshop; and the Chinese Academy of Sciences Key Laboratory of Water Cycle & Related Surface Processes, Beijing & Xain; Taiwan, CHINA, June 24 - July 02, 2008.
Impact/Purpose:
Presentation
Description:
Watershed and stormwater managers need modeling tools to evaluate alternative plans for environmental quality restoration and protection needs in urban and developing areas. A watershed-scale decision-support system, based on cost optimization, provides an essential tool to support government and local watershed planning agencies as they coordinate watershed-scale investments to achieve needed improvements in water quality. Efforts have been under way by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) since 2003 for the development of a decision-support system for placement of BMPs at strategic locations in urban watersheds. The system is called the System for Urban Stormwater Treatment and Analysis integration (SUSTAIN). This tool is designed to be used by experienced watershed and stormwater practitioners to develop, evaluate, and select optimal BMP combinations for various watershed scales based on cost and effectiveness. One dominant technical requirement for SUSTAIN is the ability to evaluate management practices at multiple scales, ranging from local to watershed applications. The site or local scale evaluation involves simulations of individual BMPs and analyses of the impact of various combinations of practices and treatment trains on local water quantity and quality. On a larger scale watershed, there may be hundreds or thousands of individual management practices that are implemented to achieve a desired cumulative benefit. The required simulations and cost comparisons of these distributed BMP options place significant challenges on the computational accuracy and simulation time for system modeling. SUSTAIN incorporates an innovative tiered approach that allows for cost-effectiveness evaluation of both individual and multiple nested watersheds to address the needs of both regional and local scale applications. This paper describes the procedures of the tiered optimization/analysis approaches in SUSTAIN for evaluating the cost-effectiveness of BMPs on a regional scale. Selected examples are provided to demonstrate the tiered optimization approach and to illustrate the implications of model simulation time and complexity on the solution of optimization questions.