Grant: Alliance Grants

In the past decades, due to urbanization urban stormwater management has become indispensable to comply with the expectation of maintaining the health of freshwater ecosystems and source of drinking water. Therefore, managing stormwater runoff sediments/suspended solids using stormwater control measures (SCMs) has attracted extensive attention from municipal and provincial governments. The City of Calgary is one of the most populated cities in Canada and has made enormous efforts in monitoring stormwater runoff since 2001 and developing a stormwater runoff modelling tool to formulate effective stormwater management strategies. As SCMs control and treat stormwater runoff generated from small contribution areas, practitioners currently do not have confidence to use the information and knowledge of stormwater runoff obtained from the existing monitoring program and modelling, which are based on much larger contribution areas, to design and analyze SCMs. Moreover, knowledge of the particle size and particle-bound pollutants of stormwater runoff sediments is also critical to design, operate, and maintain SCMs. However, such knowledge is not available yet in the city (same as in many Canadian cities). Therefore, stormwater research groups at the Universities of Calgary and Alberta, the City of Calgary along with other two organizations are partnering to propose the project to: (a) provide data and evidence-based knowledge of stormwater runoff sediments in terms of concentration, particle size, and particle-bound pollutants for typical types of land surface through stormwater monitoring and data analysis; and (b) develop a stormwater runoff modelling tool for designing and analyzing SCMs. In this project, ten highly qualified personnel will be trained in an environment that promotes theoretical knowledge and hands-on experience, as well as the principles of EDI. The outcomes of the project will benefit the Canadian partner organizations (and beyond) by providing indispensable knowledge and a modelling tool to support the design and analysis of SCMs as well as updates of stormwater management guidelines and strategies.