Stormwater Management

Urban environments such as New York City are facing increasing water quality issues associated with combined sewer systems. When it rains in these areas, water flows into stormwater catchments which convey water to local water resource recovery facilities. However when the hydraulic capacity of the sewer system is exceeded, excess flow goes into nearby receiving waters in an event called combined sewer overflow (CSO). CSOs are detrimental to local water quality and ecosystem health, and NYC has committed several billion towards addressing these issues. To address this, I led a team of environmental engineering, landscape architecture, and advertising & public relations students to design a stormwater master plan for the City College of New York for the EPA's Fifth Annual Campus RainWorks challenge, where we won first place. We used a climate-informed spatial optimization framework to place green and gray infrastructure solutions on the CCNY campus. We developed a Hidden Markov Model - Generalized Linear model for daily precipitation simulation for designing and sizing stormwater infrastructure needs. See the link for our project details including design boards and the project summary.