Integrated Catchment/Watershed Modeling

Perform integrated catchment/watershed management modeling with ease, including constituent rural areas, river systems, urban sewer systems, treatment plants, ponds, LIDs and receiving waters. Plan, analyze, design and manage unified sewer systems integral with natural areas and drainage.

In addition to detailed, separate urban and watershed modeling, PCSWMM provides the unique opportunity to integrate urban storm/combined sewers and watershed models, with dynamic interaction.

Utilize quick sub-model creation/analysis and model merging tools to allow detailed study of sub-areas or sub-systems and easy merging of multiple models
Create comprehensive macro models that include natural or rural areas, river systems, urban drainage systems, storage, treatment and receiving waters
Efficiently manage large (100,000+ entity) data sets with PCSWMM's powerful, scalable GIS engine
Automate the delineation of subcatchments and the creation of open channels from digital elevation models
Accurately represent flooded areas with integrated 1D-2D modeling
Incorporate dynamic, spatially variable rainfall with raingage-calibrated radar rainfall
Account for groundwater interflow, pollutant build-up, wash-off, routing and removal, real-time control, modeling, backwater effects from receiving channels

Spotlight Projects

Managing Stormwater in the Mackay and Mosquito Watersheds

Date:

July 2016

Location:

Vancouver, BC, Canada

Client:

Kerr Wood Leidal Consulting Engineers

Consultant:

City of North Vancouver

For more information:

Visit the City of North Vancouver's stormwater management page

Discussion

Supporting North Vancouver’s wildlife and helping to drain neighbourhoods within the District and City, the Mackay and Mosquito Watersheds are essential local green infrastructure resources with important social and ecological value.

To protect and enhance these landmarks, Kerr Wood Leidal Consulting Engineers used PCSWMM to help implement an Integrated Stormwater Management Plan (ISMP); a challenging but vital goal for the local governments, residents and businesses that call these watersheds home.

PCSWMM was utilized to analyze existing watershed conditions, identify potential risks and create hydrologic/hydraulic models for current and future development land uses. Storm sewers and culverts were calibrated and verified with local precipitation and flow monitoring data from FlowWorks. Transects for the creek channels were created in PCSWMM using LiDAR data received.

Peak flows were estimated for all pipes and channels within the 10-, 100- and 200-year return period design storms using both climate change and existing Intensity-Duration-Frequency (IDF) curves. Due to the elevation difference in the Mackay and Mosquito Watersheds, there was a need to use PCSWMM to create multiple rain gauges at increasing elevations and apply them to catchments at different elevation bands.

Now complete, Kerr Wood Leidal and the City of North Vancouver were successful in meeting their modelling objectives – to assess the adequacy of the drainage system in safely conveying stormwater runoff, and to identify locations where there remain undersized culverts, bridge crossings and drainage pipes in order to inform future works.

Radar-Generated Rainfall Data for the Humber River Watershed

Date:

November 2013

Location:

Southern Ontario, Canada

Client:

Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA)

Consultant:

AMEC Foster Wheeler

For more information:

Read the ICWMM abstract
Read Part 1 of the PowerPoint presentation
Read Part 2 of the PowerPoint presentation

Discussion

The Humber River Watershed is no exception to the downstream flood risk from impervious surface creation. Working together with the Toronto Region Conservation Authority (TRCA), AMEC Foster Wheeler retained PCSWMM to utilize radar-generated rainfall to support the evaluation of stormwater management practices for quantity (flood) control in the Toronto Region.

PCSWMM was selected due to its widespread usage, urban and rural hydrologic algorithms, GIS data structure interface and event and continuous modeling capabilities. SUSTAIN’s Best Management Practice (BMP) Siting tool was used to support the selection of suitable BMP locations that meet user-defined site suitability criteria such as size of drainage area, slope, hydrological soil group, groundwater table depth, property type and buffer distance from buildings, roads and streams.

PCSWMM’s radar-rainfall tools were used to transpose recent significant regional storms to the watershed. The transposed radar-rainfall data sets were found to be an excellent surrogate to stress test watersheds. In addition, radar data – used in place of point gauge data – successfully represented both the temporal and spatial variability of the storms, while showing a moderate increase (0% - 20%) in regional storm peaks.

The calibrated Humber River stormwater management model was deemed suitable for use in assessment of future land use changes on flood flows. It has also resulted in a better understanding of the effects of proposed new developments on flooding and has helped to confirm the level of stormwater control needed before expanding urban settlement boundaries.

Sustainable Neighbourhood Retrofit Action Plan (SNAP)

Date:

March 2010

Location:

Brampton, Ontario, Canada

Clients:

Consultant:

Computational Hydraulics Int. (CHI)

For more information:

Visit the SNAP page

Discussion

As part of an effort to prepare Brampton, Ontario's County Court neighborhood of 5,800 people for climate change and help the community become more environmentally friendly, greener streetscapes were sought.

Referred to as the Sustainable Neighbourhood Retrofit Action Plan (SNAP), this project involved using PCSWMM to evaluate a variety of Low Impact Development (LID) scenarios to determine which ones lead to the greatest improvement in stormwater quality and quantity. Flow monitoring data collected from two storm sewer locations was used for model calibration, and water quantity was continuously tracked.

PCSWMM was utilized to create the SWMM5 model as it has a number of built-in tools that assisted in project management, assembly, calibration and inference; including its physically-based LID/GI modeling approach, topological tools for fast parameterization, and the Sensitivity-based Radio Tuning Calibration (SRTC) tool that reduced the time required for calibration.

Since the completion of this project, the City of Brampton has since successfully installed its first bio-filter swale and identified a multi-objective solution, addressing irrigation and untreated stormwater.