1. Nutrient Criteria to Protect Aquatic Life of Streams and Lakes in Intensive Agricultural Watersheds
2. Landscape controls on diffuse nutrient transfers in agricultural catchments
3. Managing Urban Stormwater Quality in a Changing Climate: Science, Engineering and Policy
4. Management Practices to Reduce Nutrient Loss from Agricultural Systems: Research Results Establishing Effective and Non-effective Conservation Practices
5. Emerging Contaminants in Groundwater and Surface Water: Selected Substances, Sources, Monitoring, Risk Assessment and Management
6. Water Quality Trading: Pre-requisite Analyses
Back to the Open Workshops Introduction
Managing Urban Stormwater Quality in a Changing Climate:
Science, Engineering and Policy
This workshop will provide a forum for scientists, engineers and policy analysts addressing the issues of managing urban stormwater quality in a changing climate, with considerations for both existing facilities (and their adaptation) and future design. A fair amount of literature has been published on quantitative changes in precipitation and air temperature regimes in various parts of the world, as predicted by various types of analysis, including the downscaling of prediction of global and regional circulation models and analyses of historical data. Such work largely focused on changes in precipitation depth and intensities, and their implications for design of urban runoff conveyance and storage facilities. This workshop will aim to reach beyond these limits by examining implications of these changes for performance of existing stormwater management facilities with respect to water quality management, assessment of needs for retrofit of such facilities, and implications for stormwater management policies and future designs.
Examples of critical questions to be answered in this workshop will include:
- How well do we know the performance of existing stormwater management systems (i.e., both, physical systems and policies) for the current climate (as designed)?
- Recognizing the expected changes in the climate (i.e., with emphasis on increased air temperatures and precipitation), what are the expected implications for stormwater quantity and quality? Do the implications for quality vary for various groups of stormwater pollutants of concern? (e.g., total suspended solids and sediment, nutrients, heavy metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, fecal bacteria, temperature)?
- Can we define stormwater quality regimes which are predominantly mass-limited and transport-limited?
- Is increased urban runoff providing only higher transport capacity for a mass of pollutants controlled by other land use processes (e.g., traffic density, air pollution, building materials, soil erosion)?
- Assuming intensified urban runoff and runoff quality regimes, will decreases in stormwater management system performance be detectable, and if yes, how should we manage this deteriorating performance?
- How effective are our current stormwater management policies and do we need to modify them to reflect potentially changing stormwater quantity and quality?
- What is the best way of communicating these challenges to the public?
Chair: Jiri Marsalek, National Water Research Institute, Burlington, Ontario, Canada, Jiri.Marsalek@ec.gc.ca
Secretary: Jean-Luc Bertrand-Krajewski, Laboratoire de Génie Civil et d’Ingéniere Environnmentale, Lyon, France
Invited Talks:
1 – Henry Jun *, The Ontario Ministry of the Environment initiative on examining the needs for changes in the existing MOE stormwater management policy and manual in the light of a changing climate.
2 – Alain Mailhot **, Analysis of urban runoff/stormwater changes due to the changing climate and potential implications for stormwater quality
* Senior Policy Advisor, Ministry of the Environment, Land and Water Policy Branch, Toronto, Ontario
** Professor, Institut national de la recherche scientifique, Centre - Eau Terre Environnement, Quebec University, Québec City, Québec.
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