A drainage network-based impact matrix to support targeted blue-green-grey stormwater management solutions.

Urban floods will continue to be an alarming issue worldwide due to climate change and urban expansion. The costly and less environmentally friendly grey infrastructure is not always the most adequate solution to resolve urban pluvial flooding issues. The combination of grey and blue-green infrastructures, also called hybrid infrastructure, has been considered a promising solution for urban stormwater management. Existing approaches for identifying suitable hybrid solutions frequently rely on global multi-objective optimization algorithms. We developed a pre-screening method that decomposes a drainage network into clusters of pipes connected to sub-catchments, based on pipe hydraulic characteristic that allows for the impact of infrastructure combinations (blue-green and grey) to be mapped. Four impact matrices are proposed to map the total, local, upstream, and downstream flood reduction of all possible blue-green, grey, and hybrid solutions. Using an urban catchment in Guangzhou (China) as a case study, results showed that such an exercise could identify prime candidate locations for blue-green and grey infrastructure while filtering out ineffective locations for flood reduction. Furthermore, the impact matrices enabled the identification of flood zones where blue-green infrastructure could handle flood mitigation without the need of local grey infrastructure upgrades. As such, they are not only useful for quick screening of suitable interventions for each flooded zone, but can also potentially serve as a priori knowledge before diving into the data and computationally expensive process of finding the most effective flood mitigation solutions.

Use of Checkpoint Inhibitors in Gray Zone Lymphoma.

Checkpoint inhibitors, cancer immunotherapies, are the new forms of treatment for gray zone lymphoma, a rare subtype that combines the characteristics of both Hodgkin and non-Hodgkin disease forms. Programmed cell death protein 1/programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1/PD-1) and cytotoxic T-lymphocyte-associated protein 4 (CTLA-4) modulate the immune system function. Immunological checkpoints can be stimulatory or inhibitory, and tumors can use these checkpoints to protect against immune system attacks. This is a case report of a difficult diagnosis and describes the most current treatment using checkpoint inhibitors, through the review of the clinical record of a patient diagnosed with gray area lymphoma in August 2019, using a descriptive and cross-sectional analysis of the clinical history and disease evolution. The case showed that pembrolizumab therapy is an effective treatment option for patients with rare gray zone lymphoma refractory to different lines of treatment. Both the diagnosis and treatment of gray area lymphoma remain a challenge for the medical and multiprofessional teams, and collaboration between them ensured effective treatment for the patient.

A framework for modelling in-sewer thermal-hydraulic dynamic anomalies driven by stormwater runoff and seasonal effects.

Rain-induced surface runoff and seasons lead to short- to medium-term anomalies in combined storm- and wastewater flows and temperatures, and influence treatment processes in wastewater resource recovery facilities (WRRF). Additionally, the implementation of decentralized heat recovery (HR) technologies for energy reuse in buildings affect energy-related processes across the urban water cycle and WRRFs heat inflows. However, quantitative insights on thermal-hydraulic dynamics in sewers at network scale and across different scales are very rare. To enhance the understanding of thermal-hydraulic dynamics and the water-energy nexus across the urban water cycle we present a modular framework that couples thermal-hydraulic processes: i) on the surface, ii) in the public sewer network, iii) in households (including in-building HR systems), and iv) in lateral connections. We validate the proposed framework using field measurements at full network scale, present modelling results of extended time periods to illustrate the effect of seasons and precipitation events simultaneously, and quantify the impact of decentralized HR devices on thermal-hydraulics. Simulation results suggest that the presented framework can predict temperature dynamics consistently all year long including short- to long-term variability of in-sewer temperature. The study provides quantitative evidence that the impact of household HR technologies on WRRF inflow heat budgets is reduced by approximately 20% during wet-weather periods in comparison to dry-weather conditions. The presented framework has potential to support multiple research initiatives that will improve the understanding of the water-energy nexus, pollutant dispersion and degradation, and support maintenance campaigns at network scale.

A distributed heat transfer model for thermal-hydraulic analyses in sewer networks.

Thermal-hydraulic considerations in urban drainage networks are essential to utilise available heat capacities from waste- and stormwater. However, available models are either too detailed or too coarse; fully coupled thermal-hydrodynamic modelling tools are lacking. To predict efficiently water-energy dynamics across an entire urban drainage network, we suggest the SWMM-HEAT model, which extends the EPA-StormWater Management Model with a heat-balance component. This enables conducting more advanced thermal-hydrodynamic simulation at full network scale than currently possible. We demonstrate the usefulness of the approach by predicting temperature dynamics in two independent real-world cases under dry weather conditions. We furthermore screen the sensitivity of the model parameters to guide the choice of suitable parameters in future studies. Comparison with measurements suggest that the model predicts temperature dynamics adequately, with RSR values ranging between 0.71 and 1.1. The results of our study show that modelled in-sewer wastewater temperatures are particularly sensitive to soil and headspace temperature, and headspace humidity. Simulation runs are generally fast; a five-day period simulation at high temporal resolution of a network with 415 nodes during dry weather was completed in a few minutes. Future work should assess the performance of the model for different applications and perform a more comprehensive sensitivity analysis under more scenarios. To facilitate the efficient estimation of available heat budgets in sewer networks and the integration into urban planning, the SWMM-HEAT code is made publicly available.

Is flow control in a space-constrained drainage network effective? A performance assessment for combined sewer overflow reduction.

Recurring combined sewer overflows (CSOs) can have a significant impact on the ecological condition of receiving water bodies. There are several structural measures, like adding retention basins and switching to low impact development solutions, that have been proposed to reduce the number of sewage overflows. Besides, several flow control strategies have been discussed in scientific literature that take advantage of the space within urban drainage networks, which is assumed to be adequate, for temporary storage. The adequacy of such storage space, however, is not a universally valid assumption as a large fraction of drainage networks frequently operate close to their design discharge. In this paper, we investigate the efficacy of flow control for a space-constrained drainage network. We employ a low-cost, heuristic real time control strategy with the use of flow control devices (FCDs) and available in-sewer space to reduce the magnitude of CSOs. We consider the performance of the proposed control strategy and discuss the effect of FCD location on CSO reduction. Our results, based on over 300 rainfall-event simulations, show that the flow control strategy using limited sewer capacity is more efficient during relatively small rainfall events, where the CSO is large enough to enable reduction using the chosen control rules. The CSO is reduced, to varying degrees, for around 80% of rainfall events with peak intensity between 10 and 20 mm h-1. For larger rainfall events, the flow control is more unstable in response to abrupt water release during control operation, which seems to be unavoidable because of the water accumulation effect and the transition to pressurized pipe flow in space-constrained networks. We also found that the flow control performance is highly sensitive to the FCD location - as it depends on the interplay of the peak rainfall intensity and the water level condition immediately upstream of the FCD. The efficacy of a location for flow control is determined by the unfilled capacity (i.e., effective in-sewer storage potential) in the pipe upstream of the FCD during the rainfall peak; furthermore, the location also has to be resistant to the water accumulation effect. Using our analysis, we substantiate two anticipated caveats to flow control strategies when the storage space is limited in a drainage network: diminished performance in CSO reduction and the appearance of additional control-related challenges, which are otherwise mitigated in more spacious networks.

Stormwater management impacts of small urbanising towns: The necessity of investigating the 'devil in the detail'.

In many parts of the world, small towns are experiencing high levels of population growth and development. However, there is little understanding of how urban growth in these regional towns will impact urban runoff. We used the case study of Wangaratta, located in South-East Australia, between 2006 and 2016, to investigate land cover changes and their impacts on urban runoff discharge. Detailed spatio-temporal analysis (including neighbourhood composition analysis and supervised classification of aerial imagery) identified that population, land use and land cover changes in Wangaratta, although subtle, were mostly driven by residential growth in the outskirts of the town, where there were large increases in impervious surface area. Overall, the urban growth was minimal. However, in spite of these small changes, a sub-catchment only SWMM model showed that the increase in impervious surface area nevertheless resulted in a statistically significant increase in total runoff across the town. Particularly, this increase was most pronounced for frequent and shorter storms. The analysis of urban development pattern changes coupled with urban hydrological modelling indicated that land cover changes in regional towns, especially when analysed in detail, may result in hydrological changes in the urban region (likely to be exacerbated in coming years by changing climate) and that adaptation efforts will need to adopt a variety of approaches in both existing and growth zones. Our findings highlight the necessity of detailed fine-scale analyses in small towns as even subtle changes will have substantial future implications and robust planning and adaptation decisions are even more important when compared to larger cities due to the greater economic constraints that small towns face and their important relationship with the surrounding hinterlands.

The potential of proxy water level measurements for calibrating urban pluvial flood models.

Urban pluvial flood models need to be calibrated with data from actual flood events in order to validate and improve model performance. Due to the lack of conventional sensor solutions, alternative sources of data such as citizen science, social media, and surveillance cameras have been proposed in literature. Some of the methods proposed boast high scalability but without an on-site survey, they can only provide proxy measurements for physical flooding variables (such as water level). In this study, the potential value of such proxy measurements was evaluated by calibrating an urban pluvial flood model with data from experimental flood events conducted in a 25 × 25 m facility, monitored with surveillance cameras and conventional sensors in parallel. Both ideal proxy data and actual image-based proxy measurements with noise were tested, and the effects of measurement location and measurement noise were investigated separately. The results with error-free proxy data confirm the theoretic potential of such measurements, as in half of the calibration configurations tested, ideal proxy data increases model performance by at least 70% compared to sensor data. However, image-based proxy data can contain complex correlated errors, which have a complex and predominantly negative effect on performance.

How Urban Storm- and Wastewater Management Prepares for Emerging Opportunities and Threats: Digital Transformation, Ubiquitous Sensing, New Data Sources, and Beyond - A Horizon Scan.

Ubiquitous sensing will create many opportunities and threats for urban water management, which are only poorly understood today. To identify the most relevant trends, we conducted a horizon scan regarding how ubiquitous sensing will shape the future of urban drainage and wastewater management. Our survey of the international urban water community received an active response from both the academics and the professionals from the water industry. The analysis of the responses demonstrates that emerging topics for urban water will often involve experts from different communities, including aquatic ecologists, urban water system engineers and managers, as well as information and communications technology professionals and computer scientists. Activities in topics that are identified as novel will either require (i) cross-disciplinary training, such as importing new developments from the IT sector, or (ii) research in new areas for urban water specialists, for example, to help solve open questions in aquatic ecology. These results are, therefore, a call for interdisciplinary research beyond our own discipline. They also demonstrate that the water management community is not yet prepared for the digital transformation, where we will experience a data demand, i.e. a "pull" of urban water data into external services. The results suggest that a lot remains to be done to harvest the upcoming opportunities. Horizon scanning should be repeated on a routine basis, under the umbrella of an experienced polling organization.

Statistical failure models for water distribution pipes - A review from a unified perspective.

This review describes and compares statistical failure models for water distribution pipes in a systematic way and from a unified perspective. The way the comparison is structured provides the information needed by scientists and practitioners to choose a suitable failure model for their specific needs. The models are presented in a novel framework consisting of: 1) Clarification of model assumptions. The models originally formulated in different mathematical forms are all presented as failure rate. This enables to see differences and similarities across the models. Furthermore, we present a new conceptual failure rate that an optimal model would represent and to which the failure rate of each model can be compared. 2) Specification of the detailed data assumptions required for unbiased model calibration covering the structure and completeness of the data. 3) Presentation of the different types of probabilistic predictions available for each model. Nine different models and their variations or further developments are presented in this review. For every model an overview of its applications published in scientific journals and the available software implementations is provided. The unified view provides guidance to model selection. Furthermore, the model comparison presented herein enables to identify areas where further research is needed.

Methodology for qualitative urban flooding risk assessment.

Pluvial or surface flooding can cause significant damage and disruption as it often affects highly urbanised areas. Therefore it is essential to accurately identify consequences and assess the risks associated with such phenomena. The aim of this study is to present the results and investigate the applicability of a qualitative flood risk assessment methodology in urban areas. This methodology benefits from recent developments in urban flood modelling, such as the dual-drainage modelling concept, namely one-dimensional automatic overland flow network delineation tools (e.g. AOFD) and 1D/1D models incorporating both surface and sewer drainage systems. To assess flood risk, the consequences can be estimated using hydraulic model results, such as water velocities and water depth results; the likelihood was estimated based on the return period of historical rainfall events. To test the methodology two rainfall events with return periods of 350 and 2 years observed in Alcântara (Lisbon, Portugal) were used and three consequence dimensions were considered: affected public transportation services, affected properties and pedestrian safety. The most affected areas in terms of flooding were easily identified; the presented methodology was shown to be easy to implement and effective to assess flooding risk in urban areas, despite the common difficulties in obtaining data.