Bernard Chocat

Need for improved methodologies and measurements for sustainable management of urban water systems

Abstract In natural and artificial Urban Water Systems (UWS), there are strong interactions between urbanization processes, discharges of individual, industrial and collective wastewaters, transfer of pollutants in storm water runoff, and their impacts on natural surface and ground waters. The sustainable management of UWS is becoming very important, and needs new research and action methodologies to get a more integrated knowledge and understanding from scientific, technical, ecological, and socio-economic points of view. In this paper, methodological problems associated with modeling, decision-making tools, definition of objectives, metrology, and multidisciplinarity are identified. An improved and reliable knowledge about the short- and long-term behavior of UWS appears absolutely necessary to evaluate indicators and criteria used in various methodologies aiming at assessing sustainability. A multidisciplinary research project, named OTHU (Experimental Observatory for Urban Hydrology), which aims at providing results, knowledge, and methodologies to assess the sustainability of UWS, is then briefly presented.

Rainfall-runoff processes and modelling

Hydrological studies of rainfall-runoff processes provide the basis for estimating design flows for urban stormwater drainage systems which control floods and the transport of sediments and polluta...

A storage model for the simulation of the hydraulic behaviour of drainage networks

This paper presents a model for the hydraulic simulation of a drainage network using the storage concept. This model is easier to use than the complete Barre de Saint Venant equations and gives better results than the usual conceptual models, i.e. the Muskingum model, or than models obtained by the simplification of the Saint Venant equations (kinematic wave model and diffusion wave model).

Urban drainage: a multilingual glossary

Urban Drainage: A Multilingual Glossary has been written by research engineers and scientists with substantial experience in the urban drainage field. It provides definitive descriptions of urban drainage terms in English, French, Japanese and German, giving guidance on their appropriate usage and context. Containing well over 850 commonly-used terms in urban drainage, all expressed in a user-friendly manner, the book serves as a valuable resource for both practitioner and academic. Topics covered include: •urban hydrology/hydraulics •sewerage•surface water runoff•pollution (groundwater and surface)•receiving waters•ecology•ecotoxicology•best management practices•urban water resource management Urban Drainage: A Multilingual Glossary represents an initiative of the joint IWA/IAHR Committee on Urban Drainage and has arisen out of the long-standing terminological and tautological difficulties of many terms in common usage within international urban drainage practice.