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Assessment of the urban water system with an open, reproducible process applied to Chicago
Citation:
Erban, L., S. Balogh, H. Walker, Dan Campbell, AND T. Gleason. Assessment of the urban water system with an open, reproducible process applied to Chicago. Joint Conference of ISIE and ISSST, Chicago, IL, June 25 - 29, 2017.
Impact/Purpose:
Cities are a confluence for environmental and man-made flows of water. Water supply, wastewater discharge, flooding and combined sewer overflow are some of the major, interdependent issues that cities seek to manage. Successful management depends on a quantitative understanding of the relationships among urban water flows and storages that is difficult to obtain. We have developed a reproducible workflow for evaluating the urban water system as the package CityWaterBalance for R. R is an open source language with many active users. CityWaterBalance builds upon existing R packages and open data to largely automate the process of evaluating the urban water network, including flows lacking data. It allows the user to 1) quickly assemble a quantitative, unified picture of flows thorough an urban area, and 2) easily change the spatial and temporal boundaries of analysis to match scales relevant to local decision-making. We used CityWaterBalance to evaluate the water system in the Chicago metropolitan area on a monthly basis for water years 2001-2010. Our analysis was used to consider 1) trade-offs associated with management alternatives for stormwater and combined sewer overflows and 2) the significance of future changes in precipitation. Our approach may be used as a scoping tool for considering interventions in the urban water system or to generate input datasets for more detailed studies.
Description:
Urban water systems convey complex environmental and man-made flows. The relationships among water flows and networked storages remains difficult to comprehensively evaluate. Such evaluation is important, however, as interventions are designed (e.g, conservation measures, green infrastructure) to modify specific flows of urban water (e.g. drinking water, stormwater) that may have systemic effects. We have developed a general model that specifies the relationships among urban water system components, and a set of tools for evaluating the model for any city as the R package CityWaterBalance. CityWaterBalance provides a reproducible workflow for assessing urban water system(s) by facilitating the retrieval of open data, largely via web services, and analysis of these data using open-source R functions. It allows the user to 1) quickly assemble a quantitative, unified picture of flows thorough an urban area, and 2) easily change the spatial and temporal boundaries of analysis to match scales relevant to local decision-making. We used CityWaterBalance to evaluate the water system in the Chicago metropolitan area on a monthly basis for water years 2001-2010. Results, including the relative magnitudes and temporal variability of major water flows in greater Chicago, are used to consider 1) trade-offs associated with management alternatives for stormwater and combined sewer overflows and 2) the significance of future changes in precipitation, which is the largest term in the Chicago water balance.