Water Quality in a Changing Environment
Author: Greg Granato (USGS)
The FHWA, the Transportation Research Board, and the National Cooperative Highway Research Program have repeatedly identified a National highway-runoff database as a primary environmental research need over the past decade. Many highway-runoff studies have been done over the years to collect necessary data, but the data have not been available in a consistent and accessible electronic format. Furthermore, the computations for calculating runoff-quality statistics can be complex if one or more values are reported as being below one or more detection limits. The highway-runoff database (HRBD), published as FHWA-HEP-09-003, was developed by the U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Federal Highway Administration to serve as a data warehouse for current and future highway-runoff data sets. The database can be used to document information about a data set, monitoring site(s), highway-runoff data (including precipitation, runoff, and event-mean concentrations of water-quality constituents), quality-assurance and quality-control data, and sediment-quality data. The HRDB application also was developed to serve as a data preprocessor for the Stochastic Empirical Loading and Dilution Model (SELDM). The HRDB application, which is the graphical user interface and associated computer code, can be used to facilitate estimation of statistical properties of runoff coefficients, runoff-quality statistics, and relations between water-quality variables in highway runoff from the available data. The highway runoff database currently (2014) includes 54,384 event-mean concentrations, from 4,186 storm events monitored at 117 study sites across the country. The HRDB provides an easy-to-use graphical user interface for estimating the potential effects of highway runoff on receiving waters based on the expected quantity and quality of runoff. Ready availability of this highway-runoff data in a standard format and the ease of use of the graphical user interface should provide information to improve project delivery without compromising environmental protection.
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How to Cite: Granato, G. (2014) “The Highway-Runoff Databas (HRDB): A data warehouse and preprocessor for the Stochastic Empirical Loading and Dilution Model (SELDM)”, National Hydraulic Engineering Conference 2014. 1(2014).