High Frequency Optical Fingerprinting of Urban Storm Runoff

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Urban stormwater runoff delivers a complex cocktail of contaminants to receiving waters which degrades ecosystem health. However, we lack critical understanding of the links between pollution source, pathway and the fate of individual compounds (hydrocarbons, organic matter, tyre shards, etc.). This is largely due to the time-intensive sampling and laboratory work needed to collect, classify and count particles. To advance mechanistic understanding, and develop realistic physically-based simulations of riverine water quality, new approaches to data collection are required, particularly in urban catchments. This need is especially timely given the increasing frequency of combined sewage overflow (CSO) releases in the UK (>370k in 2021) that has led to the ongoing consultation around a new, more robust, Storm Overflows plan. This proposal takes an important step towards meeting this ambition by developing and applying new technology to enable continuous, in-situ characterisation of urban runoff, separating inorganic sediment, organic matter and anthropogenic particles such as microplastics and rubber fragments.