Bioretention is a novel best management practice for urban storm water, employed to minimize the impact of urban runoff during storm events. Bioretention consists of porous media layers that can remove pollutants from infiltrating runoff via mechanisms that include adsorption, precipitation, and filtration. However, the effectiveness of bioretention in treating repetitive inputs of runoff has n...

Vegetated swales are an accepted and commonly implemented sustainable urban drainage system in the built urban environment. Laboratory and field research has defined the effectiveness of a vegetated swale in sediment detention during a single rainfall-runoff event. Event mean concentrations of suspended and bed load sediment have been calculated using current best analytical practice, providing...

Surface waters and urban drainage systems are usually studied separately. However there are important interactions between both systems. Urban drainage systems can have an important impact on the surface waters, mainly at combined sewer overflows. On the other hand during periods of high water levels in a river, the runoff from the urban drainage system can be significantly influenced by backwa...

Ferrocyanide compounds enter the environment as anti-caking additives to road salts. In illuminated aquatic environments, the salts dissociate and form toxic free cyanide, which can then be lost through volatilization. The most common techniques for analysis of cyanide in environmental samples measure total and free (generally weak-acid dissociable, WAD) cyanide species. Cyanide has been detect...

Different wipe materials and wetting agents have been traditionally used to collect pesticide residues from indoor surfaces in human exposure assessments. Such methods were developed to estimate human pesticide exposure through skin contact. From an environmental point of view, wiping methods may be also applied to predict the runoff potential of pesticides on urban impervious surfaces. Since l...

Trace metal contributions in urban storm water are of concern to environmental managers because of their potential impacts on ambient receiving waters. The mechanisms and processes that influence temporal and spatial patterns of trace metal loading in urban storm water, however, are not well understood. The goals of the present study were to quantify trace metal event mean concentration (EMC), ...

Stormwater management using water sensitive urban design is expected to be part of future drainage systems. This paper aims to model the combination of local retention units, such as soakaways, with subsurface detention units. Soakaways are employed to reduce (by storage and infiltration) peak and volume stormwater runoff; however, large retention volumes are required for a significant peak red...

Effects of climatic changes, progressing urbanization and improved environmental controls on the simulated urban stormwater quality in a Northern Sweden community were studied. Future scenarios accounting for those changes were developed and their effects simulated with the Storm Water Management Model (SWMM). It was observed that the simulated stormwater quality was highly sensitive to the sce...

Modelling rainfall-runoff processes in urban catchments has become an increasingly relevant issue, for instance to estimate the risk associated with urban flooding in densely populated areas. This needs hydrological models which, besides rainfall information, require good input data of detailed surface characteristics, such as imperviousness to accurately predict rainfall-runoff. One way to obt...