The Stormwater Report

Predicting how runoff from heavy storms will affect the amount of water flowing through streams, rivers, and other surface waters is critically important for stormwater professionals and watershed managers. Accurate streamflow forecasting helps the water sector prepare for flood events, develop water supply plans, design infrastructure that suits the unique hydrological conditions of its surroundings, […]

Conventional approaches to studying rainfall patterns across both large distances and long timeframes suffer from a Goldilocks problem. For example, while a rain gauge may provide comprehensive precipitation data for a specific point on a near-constant basis, accurately capturing the variable nature of rainfall across a watershed may require researchers to deploy too many gauges […]

Part of the challenge of achieving financial and social buy-in for flood management projects is that their benefits often only become apparent when flooding does not occur. Without the ability to demonstrate, for example, how investment in flood control by public officials can minimize future disasters or how taking simple mitigation steps can help homeowners […]

New visualization tool mixes FEMA data with video-game technology to model flood damages before they occur The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) offers a long list of tools and datasets to help U.S. residents understand their specific property’s risk of experiencing severe flooding. However, terms like 100-year flood and storm surge do little to […]

When Esri (Redlands, Calif.) first released the ArcGIS spatial analysis platform in 1999, it empowered users to visualize abstract data in a way that put computer-assisted watershed planning (literally) on the map. Just under two decades later, the open-source platform now enables seamless map-sharing, intuitive rendering features, and has inspired a dedicated circle of coders […]

As the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) begins to focus on stricter regulations to deter industrial stormwater pollution as one of its National Enforcement Initiatives for the next 3 years, administrators of large industrial properties may want to consider new solutions to maximize the efficiency of their runoff management systems. Emerging technologies — such as […]