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HSPF Toolkit: a New Tool for Stormwater Management at the Watershed Scale
Citation:
MOHAMOUD, Y. M., R. S. PARMAR, K. L. WOLFE, AND J. N. CARLETON. HSPF Toolkit: a New Tool for Stormwater Management at the Watershed Scale. Presented at Sustainability 2008 - Green Practices for the Water Environment Conference, National Harbor, MD, June 22 - 25, 2008.
Impact/Purpose:
Our objective is to address HSPF limitations especially its limited capability to model urban watersheds with storm sewer networks and best management practices (BMPs), which are needed as part of low impact development (LID) promoted by many local jurisdictions.
Description:
The Hydrological Simulation Program - FORTRAN (HSPF) is a comprehensive watershed model endorsed by US EPA for simulating point and nonpoint source pollutants. The model is used for developing total maximum daily load (TMDL) plans for impaired water bodies; as such, HSPF is the core watershed model in the US EPA BASINS (Better Assessment Science for Integrating Point and Nonpoint Sources) modeling framework. It characterizes the entire landscape of a watershed into pervious land (PERLAND), impervious land (IMPLND), and receiving surface waters (RECHRES). Its representation of land use is a feature that makes the model highly suitable for modeling streamflow and water quality for watersheds with mixed land uses. HSPF simulates streamflow as the sum of surface, interflow, and baseflow at user-defined temporal and spatial scales. It also simulates water quality constituents including sediment, pathogens (fecal coliform, etc.), pesticide chemicals, nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus), tracers (chloride, bromide, dyes, etc.), carbon dioxide, inorganic carbon, zooplankton, phytoplankton, benthic algae, organic carbon, BOD, DO, pH, and alkalinity at user-defined scales. Our objective is to address HSPF limitations especially its limited capability to model urban watersheds with storm sewer networks and best management practices (BMPs), which are needed as part of low impact development (LID) promoted by many local jurisdictions. To meet these modeling challenges, stormwater management models must not only simulate the mitigation effects of detention-based BMPs, but also the effects of infiltration-based BMPs that support LID requirements and control runoff at the source. We developed a web-based toolkit for HSPF to address these stormwater modeling limitations and, in this presentation, we will discuss these enhanced HSPF capabilities.