Stormwater Management Course
Following the March 2020 workshop on Stormwater Planning in the Era of Climate Change, many municipalities expressed interest in applying downscaled precipitation projections to their own stormwater utilities. To begin to fulfill this need, Dr. Franco Montalto of Drexel University offered a course in summer 2020 for Drexel undergraduate, graduate and continuing education students (many of which were Drexel alumni) to work with interested municipalities in developing design storms for the future. The students worked with seven municipalities on the East Coast to address the following questions:
- How should stormwater utilities update, amend, or modify their stormwater policies given observed and predicted climate change?
- Where and how do we obtain historical and future climate data for a given location?
- How uncertain and variable could future precipitation conditions be and what factors create that uncertainty and variability?
- What is the state of the art regarding how to factor climate change into stormwater planning?
- How different will future design storms be from those based on historical precipitation?
The class was written up in the EWRI Currents newsletter in 2020. The students presented their work to the municipalities and the public in the September 2020 CCRUN seminar. Their final reports to the municipalities can be found here:
- Camden, NJ
- Baltimore, MD
- Washington DC
- Richmond, VA
- Charles County, MD
- Takoma Park, MD
- Frederick, MD
Read more about the Stormwater Workshop
Watch the Adapting Stormwater Management seminar