Investigation of the low impact development strategies for highly urbanized area via auto-calibrated storm water management model (SWMM)

This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of the low impact development (LID) practices on sustainable urban flood storm water management. We applied three LID techniques, i.e. green roof, permeable pavements and bioretention cells, on a highly urbanized watershed in Istanbul, Turkey. The EPA-SWMM was used as a hydrologic-hydraulic model and the model calibration was performed by the well-known Parameter ESTimation (PEST) tool. The rainfall-runoff events occurred between 2012 and 2020. A sensitivity analysis on the parameter selection was applied to reduce the computational cost. The Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency coefficient (NSE) was used as the objective function and it was calculated as 0.809 in the model calibration. The simulations were conducted for six different return periods of a storm event, i.e. 2, 5, 10, 25, 50 and 100 years, in which the synthetic storm event hyetographs were produced by means of the alternating block method. The results revealed that the combination of green roof and permeable pavements have the major impact on both the peak flood reduction and runoff volume reduction compared to the single LIDs. The maximum runoff reduction percentage was obtained as 56.02% for a 10 years return period of a storm event in the combination scenario.