For the past year, RiverLab’s Anneliese Sytsma has been working with Engineering Research Center ReNUWIt – Re-inventing the Nation’s Urban Water Infrastructure – on her PhD dissertation research. This month, ReNUWIt highlighted her research on ‘connected impervious surfaces’ on the ReNUWIt website- see here. Anneliese is working on the manuscript now and hopes to publish before the end of the year.
Accurate methods to predict impervious surface connectivity are needed to improve hydrologic modeling and efficient siting of distributed stormwater technologies. ReNUWIt researchers are developing a new method for estimating impervious surface connectivity across different soil types, slopes, rainfall scenarios and landcover parameters. The outcomes of this research may be used as hydrologic model inputs and to inform more efficient distributed stormwater control siting across heterogeneous urban landscapes.