Abstract
Quantifying urban runoff during frequent rainfall events is a key element in quality management of urban water due to their high contribution to the annual runoff flow. This explains the growing interest among hydrologists in studying runoff flow on urban surfaces. In this paper, we review most of the experimental approaches as well as the modeling ones conducted in the literature to understand and estimate runoff flow on urban areas. This review highlights the incoherence between our current understanding of the hydrological behavior of urban areas during frequent events and our conception of the loss functions in the urban drainage models. Field studies provided more insight into the determinant processes occurring on the different surface types during frequent events with depression storage being a fundamental element varying between surface types and for the same surface type and infiltration process being relatively important on paved areas especially in their cracks that constitute preferential pathways for rainwater. Analyzing a wide range of urban drainage models showed that these elements along with the temporal evolution of the hydrological behavior of urban surfaces due to seasonal and state conditions are not fully integrated in the models’ structures, which were initially developed for heavy rainfall events. Adapting the assumptions of urban drainage models based on these new factors must improve the performance of hydrological models for frequent rainfall events.
Highlights
In a context of growing awareness of the detrimental impacts of urban runoff contamination on receiving water bodies [1,2], more research and operational efforts are being invested in the management of urban stormwater quality
In an attempt to understand and redress the weak performance of urban runoff models in representing runoff losses on impervious areas during frequent events, which are essential for urban water quality management, we investigated the most commonly used models and analyzed their structure in light of the latest knowledge on the observed behavior of urban surfaces during storm weather
The importance of these retentions might be marginal during heavy events, but for small events and annual scale calculations, they become a key element in conditioning the surface exchange with all the other compartments: with the surface through runoff, with the air through evaporation, and with the soil through infiltration
Summary
In a context of growing awareness of the detrimental impacts of urban runoff contamination on receiving water bodies [1,2], more research and operational efforts are being invested in the management of urban stormwater quality. While the transfer processes can be described physically, the production mechanism especially on impervious surfaces is still deemed highly complex and far from being fully understood [15,16] It is modeled in a conceptual fashion involving a high degree of empiricism contingent on the conditions for which they are constructed [17]. The runoff volume results from a complex interaction of different hydrological processes that are usually broken down into three processes: retention, evaporation, and infiltration In this paragraph, we present a review of the experimental studies realized in the literature to evaluate the relative contribution of these processes to the runoff losses on urban impervious surfaces
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