Current urban water management practices aim to remove stormwater and wastewater efficiently from urban areas. An alternative approach is to consider stormwater and wastewater as a potential resource substitute for a portion of the water imported via the reticulated supply system. A holistic view of urban water resources provides the framework for the evaluation of the demand for water supply, ...

[1] Understanding climate, vegetation, and soil controls on recharge is essential for estimating potential impacts of climate variability and land use/land cover change on recharge. Recharge controls were evaluated by simulating drainage in 5-m-thick profiles using a one-dimensional (1-D) unsaturated flow code (UNSAT-H), climate data, and vegetation and soil coverages from online sources. Soil ...

Ground water recharge is often estimated through the calibration of ground water flow models. We examine the nature of calibration errors by considering some simple mathematical and numerical calculations. From these calculations, we conclude that calibrating a steady-state ground water flow model to water level extremes yields estimates of recharge that have the same value as the time-varying ...

Stormwater run-off from for example industrial areas as well as roads with heavy traffic may contain considerable amounts of pollutants. Run-off from these areas may require special treatment to fully comply with existing environmental regulations and safeguard the receiving water bodies. In this study, flocculation and membrane filtration are tested to evaluate their efficacy in removing heavy...

To improve bacterial removal, a traditional stormwater biofilter can be augmented with biochar, but it is unknown whether bacterial removal remains consistent as the biochar weathers during intermittent exposure to stormwater under dry-wet and freeze-thaw cycles. To examine the effect of weathering on bacterial removal capacity of biochar, we subjected biochar-augmented sand filters (or simplif...

Inorganic chemicals in urban stormwater and snowmelt runoff originate from catchment geology and anthropogenic activities. The occurrence, partitioning and mobility of six minerals and six trace metal (TM) indicators of anthropogenic activities were studied in stormwater, snowmelt and baseflow in four urban catchments, and the sampling of inorganics was supplemented by measurements of electrica...

The presence of microbial contaminants in urban stormwater is a significant concern for public health; however, their removal by traditional stormwater biofilters has been reported as inconsistent and inadequate. Recent work has explored the use of biochar to improve performance of stormwater biofilters under simplified conditions that do not consider potential effects of biofilm development on...

Capturing stormwater is becoming a new standard for sustainable urban stormwater management, which can be used to supplement water supply portfolios in water-stressed cities. The key advantage of harvesting stormwater is to use low impact development (LID) systems for treatment to meet water quality requirement for non-potable uses. However, the lack of scientific studies to validate the safety...

Stormwater infiltration systems (SIS) have been set up to collect and infiltrate urban stormwater runoff in order reduce flooding artificially recharge aquifers. Such practices produce environmental changes shallow groundwater ecosystems like an increase organic matter concentrations that could drive structure functions of microbial communities. Previous works suggested SIS influence physico-ch...