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Enhancement of the EPA Stormwater BMP Decision-Support Tool (SUSTAIN) - slides
Citation:
LEE, J. G., A. SELVAKUMAR, K. Alvi, J. Riverson, J. X. Zhen, R. Murphy, AND L. Shoemaker. Enhancement of the EPA Stormwater BMP Decision-Support Tool (SUSTAIN) - slides. Presented at Low Impact Development Symposium, Philadelphia, PA, September 25 - 28, 2011.
Impact/Purpose:
To inform the public.
Description:
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been developing and improving a decision-support tool for placement of stormwater best management practices (BMPs) at strategic locations in urban watersheds. The tool is called the System for Urban Stormwater Treatment and Analysis INtegration (SUSTAIN). After about 6 years of initial efforts, the first version of SUSTAIN was publicly released in late 2009 (http://www.epa.gov/ednnrmrl/models/sustain/index.html). Since then, the tool has been continuously improved to better facilitate the setup and application by enhancing the output accuracy and credibility. The improvements include: i) enhancement of BMP siting tool; ii) enhancement of both BMP and watershed simulation modules; and iii) amendment of optimization module efficiency. More decision criteria, such as land ownership, were added to the BMP siting tool. The Horton infiltration method was included in both BMP and watershed simulation modules. BMP modules have been expanded by adding more flexibility in buffer strip simulation; facilitating better user interface for porous pavement; adding a plug flow method in water quality modeling; expanding the classes of sediment particle size distribution; adding new BMP templates; and enhancing the interfaces for BMP templates to reflect the actual physical parameters in reality. Watershed modules have also been improved by updating the old SWMM code (5.0.009) with the current EPA SWMM5 code (5.0.021); including dynamic routing algorithms for simulating CSO controls; adding the Curve Number method for infiltration; improving particle size distributions in sediment modeling; and adding more modeling flexibility to analyze the effectiveness of applying non-structural BMPs. Optimization module enhancement included: addition of more decision variables for optimization; inclusion of sub-hourly time-step for BMP and routing network simulation; and supplementation of a simple O&M cost factor with guidance in cost estimation. The details of the updates and improvements, i.e., the enhancements to SUSTAIN Version 1.0, will be described in this paper.