Stormwater quality characteristics in (Dutch) urban areas and performance of settlement basins

Stormwater quality characteristics in (Dutch) urban areas and performance of settlement basins

Boogaard, F.C.
Van de Ven, F.
Langeveld, J.G.
Van de Giesen, N.

Civil Engineering and Geosciences

Water Management

2014-03-19

Stormwaters, flowing into storm sewers, are known to significantly increase the annual pollutant loads entering urban receiving waters and this results in significant degradation of the receiving water quality. Knowledge of the characteristics of stormwater pollution enables urban planners to incorporate the most appropriate stormwater management strategies to mitigate the effects of stormwater pollution on downstream receiving waters. This requires detailed information on stormwater quality, such as pollutant types, sediment particle size distributions, and how soluble pollutants and heavy metals attach themselves to sediment particles. This study monitored stormwater pollution levels at over 150 locations throughout the Netherlands. The monitoring has been ongoing for nearly 15 years and a total of 7,652 individual events have been monitored to date. This makes the database the largest stormwater quality database in Europe. The study compared the results to those presented in contemporary international stormwater quality research literature. The study found that the pollution levels at many of the Dutch test sites did not meet the requirements of the European Water Framework Directive (WFD) and Dutch Water Quality Standards. Results of the study are presented and recommendations are made on how to improve water quality with the implementation of Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDS) devices.

stormwater quality
stormwater characteristics
monitoring
stormwater treatment

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:fb7f2458-c23d-4920-98a1-fb351d8e1e15

https://doi.org/10.3390/challe5010112

MDPI

2078-1547

Challenges, 5 (1), 2014

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2014 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).