Abstract

Conservation of water is essential as climate change coupled with land use changes influence the distribution of water availability. Stormwater harvesting (SWH) is a widely used conservation measure, which reduces pressure on fresh water resources. However, determining the availability of stormwater and identifying the suitable sites for SWH require consideration of various socio-economic and technical factors. Earlier studies use demand, ratio of runoff to demand and weighted demand distance, as the screening criteria. In this study, a Geographic Information System (GIS) based screening methodology is adopted for identifying potential suitable SWH sites in urban areas as a first pass, and then a detailed study is done by applying suitability criteria. Initially, potential hotspots are identified by a concept of accumulated catchments and later the sites are screened and ranked using various screening parameters namely demand, ratio of runoff to demand and weighted demand distance. During this process, the opinion of experts for finalizing the suitable SWH sites brings subjectivity in the methodology. To obviate this, heuristic (Saaty Analytic hierarchy process (AHP)) and non-heuristic approaches (Entropy weight, and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) weighing techniques) are adapted for allotting weights to the parameters and applied in the ranking of SWH sites in Melbourne, Australia and Dehradun, India. It is observed that heuristic approach is not effective for the study area as it was affected by the subjectivity in the expert opinion. Results obtained by non-heuristic approach come out to be in a good agreement with the sites finalized for SWH by the water planners of the study area. Hence, the proposed ranking methodology has the potential for application in decision making of suitable storm water harvesting sites.

Highlights

  • Scarcity of water is a major concern for the world

  • The study focuses on screening a few suitable Stormwater harvesting (SWH) sites within a region of interest using a Geographic Information System (GIS) based robust methodology, which utilizes Demand, ratio of runoff to demand and weighted demand distance as screening parameters

  • A suitable site should fulfill the criteria of high demand, high ratio of runoff to demand and a low weighted demand distance

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Summary

Introduction

Scarcity of water is a major concern for the world. There is need to integrate the allocation and management of water supply, wastewater resources and stormwater in order to sustainably manage the scarce resource [1]. Geographic Information System (GIS) facilitates the swift screening of potentially suitable SWH sites in the urban areas. A GIS based screening methodology for identifying suitable SWH sites were developed [11]. Various screening parameters such as Demand, ratio of Runoff to Demand and weighted Demand distance were evaluated for site selection. The use of different weight allocations methods is yet to be explored in ranking of storm water harvesting sites. It is not known how these different weighing approaches can help the water planners. This paper is organized in following subsections, i.e., methodology used, results, discussion and conclusions

Methodology
Identification and Evaluation of Screening Parameters
Normalization to a Common Scale
Saaty Heuristic Approach
Non-Heuristic Approaches
Case Study Application and Results
Application of Methodology to Melbourne City
Non-Heuristic Method
PCA Method
Application of Methodology to Dehradun city
Findings
Discussion
Conclusions

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