Analysis of rainfall runoff characteristics from a subtropical urban lawn catchment in South-east China

Abstract

Characteristics of rainfall runoff from a 3.26hm² urban catchment with predominant land-use as lawn in Xiamen City, South-east China were investigated and analyzed. Water quality and quantity measurements of rainfall runoff were conducted for ten rainfall events over the period March, 2008 to April, 2009. The results indicated that chemical oxygen demand (COD) and total phosphorus (TP) were the major pollutants with event mean concentrations of 56.09 and 0.44 mg·L^-1. From hydrograph and pollutograph analysis of two typical rainfall events, it was clear that the peak rainfall preceded the peak flowrate by about 15–20 min. Meanwhile, concentrations of major pollutants showed multiple peaks and these peaks usually preceded peak flowrate. There were no distinctive first-flush effects except for the rainfall events with the longest rainfall duration and largest runoff volume, which was verified by the fact that the first 30% runoff volume (FF30) carried 39.36% of the total suspended solids (TSS) load, 35.17% of the COD load, 28.13% of the TP load and 39.03% of the nitrate nitrogen load. Multivariate regression analysis further demonstrated that the total runoff volume had a positive correlation with the FF30 of TSS and COD.

Keywords

rainfall runoff / first flush / pollution characteristics / urban lawn catchment

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 50778098) and the Youth Project of Fujian Provincial Department of Science & Technology (No. 2007F3093).

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2014 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg