You are here:
An R Package for Open, Reproducible Analysis of Urban Water Systems, With Application to Chicago
Citation:
Erban, L., S. Balogh, Dan Campbell, AND H. Walker. An R Package for Open, Reproducible Analysis of Urban Water Systems, With Application to Chicago. Open Water Journal. Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, 5(1):26-40, (2018).
Impact/Purpose:
Urban areas have complex needs surrounding water. Ensuring high-quality water supplies, treating wastewaters, managing flooding, with aging infrastructure and shifting populations, are major challenges often addressed in isolation. Yet urban water flows are tightly connected, and changing one affects the others. To understand system effects, we need to track the major flows of water through a given urban area, creating a quantified portrait of its water system. The data for US cities are abundant, but it is unnecessarily difficult to discover and integrate them. We have developed an open source process, as the R package CityWaterBalance, for acquiring open data from a variety of sources, estimating the magnitudes of unmeasured flows, and conducting a quick and comprehensive assessment of water flows through an urban area. It may be used as a scoping tool to consider the systemic impacts of a proposed intervention or where to invest resources in more intensive modeling efforts. In this work we introduce CityWaterBalance and demonstrate an application to the case of the Chicago metro area. Our results put Chicago’s efforts to manage stormwater and combined sewer overflows in the context of anticipated increases in precipitation, among other insights.
Description:
Urban water systems consist of natural and engineered flows of water interacting in complex ways. System complexity can be understood via mass conservative models that account for the interrelationships among all major flows and storages. We have developed a generic urban water system model in the R package CityWaterBalance. CityWaterBalance provides a reproducible workflow for studying urban water systems by facilitating automated retrievals of open data and post-processing with open source R functions. It allows the user to 1) rapidly assemble a quantitative, comprehensive assessment of flows thorough an urban area, and 2) easily change the spatial and temporal boundaries of analysis. We use CityWaterBalance to evaluate the water system in the Chicago metropolitan area on a monthly basis for water years 2001-2010. Results are used to consider 1) impacts of management decisions aimed at reducing stormwater and combined sewer overflows and 2) the significance of future changes in precipitation.
