States National Research Council Research Articles

Special Issue on Urban Storm-Water Management in the 21st Century

As the practice of storm-water management evolves, so has our understanding of the tools. As we move away from a myopic flood control perspective, new tools to include what we now call green infrastructure best management practices (BMPs) were developed. Green roofs, rain gardens, and porous pavements appeared, with much of the design elements based on reasonable estimates of performance, thus the term “best.” Now we as a profession are moving toward a more engineered approach, with designs based on scientific knowledge of the processes, from soil physics and chemistry to hydrology and hydraulics. Soon it may be time to retire BMPs and move forward with the term “storm-water control measures,” as recommended by the National Academies authors of Urban Stormwater in the United States (National Research Council 2008). This issue of the Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering is devoted to this evolving field of storm-water sustainability, and the effort to predict performance of our storm-water control measures. The 10 papers in this special issue reflect this evolution. Papers range from evaluating the concentration of effluent scoured from catch basins to cost-estimation tools, plus the inclusion of green-infrastructure tools within the International Stormwater BMP Database. Green and stone roofs are represented as are level spreaders. Bioretention/bioinfiltration rain gardens, however, received the most attention with papers on media depth, phosphorus removal, process modeling, mounding, and fines accumulation. This collection truly demonstrates our increasing knowledge base. This effort is a result of collaboration between the Stormwater Infrastructure Committee and Urban Water Resources Research Council, together with the Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering Publications Committee. Conference proceedings from recent Environmental and Water Resources Institute (EWRI) congresses and low-impact development (LID) conferences were reviewed, and a select group of authors was invited to expand and revise their work. These papers passed through the standard journal peer-review process. We hope that this set of papers is of use to the profession. We would like to thank all the contributing authors, the reviewers, and William Ritter, as editor, for their efforts in this special issue.

Meeting the Future Challenges of Air Quality Management in the United States

The U.S. Clean Air Act (CAA, or the Act) and its amendments has achieved substantial progress in cleaning up the nation's air. Over the past 30 years, the CAA reduced emissions of the 6 principal (“criteria”) pollutants by over 25%, even while gross domestic product (GDP) has increased over 150% and population and energy consumption rose by nearly 40%. However, despite the tremendous gains the Act has brought, the country's air quality management (AQM) system still faces substantial challenges. In response to a congressional request for an independent evaluation of the overall effectiveness of the CAA, the National Research Council formed the Committee on Air Quality Management. Composed of 25 members with diverse areas of air quality expertise, the committee was charged with developing scientific and technical recommendations for strengthening the nation's AQM system. In 2004, the National Academies published their recommendations in a text entitled Air Quality Management in the United States (National Research Council, 2004).