How can we lower the impact of residential parcels on urban hydrology?
Walk through any neighborhood and you'll see differences in how residential parcels are developed. Some have downspouts that spill to the yard, others drain down the driveway and directly to the storm sewer network. Some have native landscaping, others have turfgrass. Some are just like their neighbors, others stand alone in their adoption of rain gardens and other low-impact practices.
What does this mean for hydrologic fluxes - surface runoff, deep drainage, and evapotranspiration - in our cities? How does the "optimal" low-impact intervention vary depending on hyper-local conditions? I run modeling sensitivity studies and collect field data from residential neighborhoods to explore these types of questions.
What does this mean for hydrologic fluxes - surface runoff, deep drainage, and evapotranspiration - in our cities? How does the "optimal" low-impact intervention vary depending on hyper-local conditions? I run modeling sensitivity studies and collect field data from residential neighborhoods to explore these types of questions.
Research Projects
Low-impact interventions to a parcel
Using ParFlow.CLM, I model 5 low-impact interventions alone and in combination with one another and rank their effectiveness at reducing runoff, increasing deep drainage, and increasing evapotranspiration. One interesting finding is that certain combinations of interventions have a synnergistic effect on fluxes - their effect is greater than you would predict from adding the impact of each individual intervention. Voter, C.B. and S.P. Loheide II. 2018. Urban Residential Surface and Subsurface Hydrology: Synergistic Effects of Low-Impact Features at the Parcel-Scale. Water Resources Research, 54. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018WR022534 Measuring runoff from a residential block
While urban streams often have good records of stream flow which can be used to estimate runoff from an entire catchment, it is challenging to measure how much runoff is generated at smaller scales, e.g. from a residential block. I am developing and testing removable devices to measure runoff from small areas just before it flows into storm sewer grates.
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What's weather got to do with it?
Using climate data from the 50 largest U.S. cities, I explore how the hydrologic impact of low-impact interventions varies with climate. There is a particularly notable change in how water is partitioned between deep drainage and evapotranspiration as climate transitions from humid to arid locations. Publication in prep |
Most sensitive areas within a city
Residential parcels comprise nearly 50% of land in Madison, each with a different owner in charge of what happens on that land. I use property assessor data to extrapolate results of parcel-scale models to the city. This allows us to identify parcels with the a high potential to change catchment-scale hydrologic fluxes by adopting low-impact practices. |
