Roanoke Urban Stormwater Research: Lick Run / Trout Run Phase V Final Report

Effective management and restoration of urban watersheds requires considerable information describing the watershed’s land surface, drainage system, and receiving streams, in order to understand the important hydrologic and ecologic processes, and to make informed decisions about how to allocate resources for watershed improvements. Previous research has focused on the creation of Watershed Master Plans to provide recommendations for maintaining and improving the function of City of Roanoke watersheds. This year, research has focused on the creation of tools to assist the City in making informed decisions pertaining to land development and stormwater best management practice (BMP) design. This report outlines 1) the development of web apps to assist the City with data synthesis and analysis, 2) the creation of a hydrology and hydraulics model to simulate watershed hydrology under existing conditions and a variety of development and/or stormwater BMP implementation scenarios, and 3) the review of stormwater management design manuals for various states and municipalities.

This report is submitted in tandem with a literature review of stormwater management design manuals that is generally organized according to the tasks outlined in the 2018 Phase V Scope of Research. Section 1 is an Introduction that describes the ongoing relationship between the City and the Virginia Tech Via Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering that made this work possible, and also describes the layout of subsequent sections.

Section 2 describes the Stream Hydrology and Rainfall Knowledge System (SHARKS) web app that was developed to provide the City with a platform to rapidly synthesize, visualize, and analyze data from various meteorological and hydrologic data sources. Section 3 describes the library of storm event precipitation and runoff data contained in Appendix II. This section also presents the MINNOWS web app that was developed to complement the SHARKS app and to provide an interactive platform to identify spatial and temporal trends in the storm event library. Section 4 describes the development of the hydrologic and hydraulic model for the combined Lick Run/Trout Run watersheds and Section 5 provides an overview of the stormwater management design manual review. Section 6 provides the references used in this report. Finally, Appendix I contains the relative flow/depth rating curves created for the nine Roanoke storm sewer depth sensors and Appendix II contains a library of storm event precipitation and runoff data for each 2018 event.

Although the submittal of this report marks the end of the 2018 Scope of Research, the work performed during this period has continued the development of a long-term collaboration between the City and VT for expansion of the science of urban stormwater management, and its application to the City’s watersheds.