Advancing Urban Stormwater Modelling and Management

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Canada uses more than five Billion kilograms of road salt every winter on roads and parking lots for winter road maintenance and de-icing operations. Our research team has keenly investigated and published on the severity of the adverse water quality effects on aquatic life in urban streams and the alarming rapid rate of degradation of our invaluable drinking water sources [1] [8]. Many municipalities have introduced new initiatives to address the growing public interest for properly managing the adverse effects of road salts in our cities from a sustainable water management perspective. This five-year research program will apply a combination of theoretical, laboratory experiments, field-scale pilot tests, physically-based numerical models as well as novel machine learning techniques to advance the development of innovative methods for more accurate urban stormwater contaminant source delineation and on the fate and transport characterization of road salts for better protection of source waters from further degradation and will develop new and innovative techniques/solutions for improvement of the quality of impaired waters. The short-term goals of this research program, will include: (1) development of novel models with users-friendly interfaces that can be used by road authorities and municipalities to judiciously prescribe the right amount(s) of road salt to be applied at the right time(s) on roadways and parking lots during a given winter storm event; (2) advancement of the design of a new generation of roadside ditch first-flush runoff capture and treatment systems for protection of the environmentally sensitive areas; (3) development of more accurate modelling of the road salt-induced density-driven stratification and 3D mixing in stormwater management wet ponds and on the chloride concentration-duration statistics in the receiving urban streams, particularly during the critical Spring spawning period for protection of the sensitive aquatic life; (4) investigation of the complex nonlinear inter-relationships among the key natural and anthropogenic factors (e.g. chloride concentration-duration statistics) that govern urban stream habitat suitability for aquatic life; and (5) advancement of the scientific knowledge on the transport mechanisms of road salt in surface water as it travels through roadside ditches and leaky storm sewer networks, polluting both our precious drinking water sources and urban streams.