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Influence of Three Permeable Pavement Surfaces on Nitrogen Treatment
Citation:
Brown, R. AND M. Borst. Influence of Three Permeable Pavement Surfaces on Nitrogen Treatment. Presented at World Environmental & Water Resources Congress (EWRI 2013), Cincinnati, OH, May 19 - 23, 2013.
Impact/Purpose:
This abstract will highlight the results from nitrogen being released from the three different types of permeable pavement at the Edison Environmental Center's permeable parking lot.
Description:
Nitrogen is a stressor of concern in many nutrient sensitive watersheds often associated with algal blooms and resulting fish kills. Communities are increasingly installing green infrastructure stormwater control measures (SCMs) to reduce pollutant loads associated with stormwater runoff. Permeable pavement is a SCM that has limited research on side-by-side nutrient performance of different pavement surface types. The existing studies commonly have small, short-duration datasets and are often limited to a single permeable surface making it difficult to extrapolate and compare the results. In 2009, EPA constructed a 0.4-ha (1-acre) parking lot surfaced with three types of permeable pavement (interlocking concrete pavers [ICP], porous concrete [PC], and porous asphalt [PA]) to measure water quality effects. Each permeable surface type has four equally-sized, lined sections that direct infiltrate to collection tanks that enable composite sampling for water quality analysis. Each lined section is 55 m2 (590 ft2) and has an impervious hot mix asphalt contributing drainage area of about 36 m2 (390 ft2). Samples analyzed in this paper were collected at roughly monthly intervals for more than two years. Samples were also collected and analyzed from rainwater, rooftop runoff, and asphalt runoff to provide comparisons to the infiltrate. The dominant speciated forms of nitrogen in rainwater were ammonium and nitrate. As the rainwater transported solids with runoff, organic nitrogen became dominant, and some of the ammonium in the rainwater was transformed into nitrate. After the runoff infiltrated through each permeable surface, the dominant speciated form of nitrogen was nitrate after passing through the aerobic conditions of the storage gallery below the permeable surface. Interestingly, nitrite was typically undetected or around the detection limit in the infiltrate from ICP and PC, but it was measureable for PA. Overall, of the three pavement surfaces, the infiltrate from the PA had the largest TN concentrations.
