GMC Environmental’s Rob Brown published in the Journal of Hydrology

Goodwyn Mills Cawood (GMC) Senior Water Resources Manager, Rob Brown, PhD, PE, has been published in the November 2022 issue of the Journal of Hydrology, for his work pertaining to green infrastructure practices.  

A member of GMC’s Environmental team, Rob co-authored the article, Fine scale hydrologic modelling of bioretention using DRAINMOD-urban: Verifying performance across multiple systems, with professors from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, North Carolina State University and Penn State to expand on the features in the modelling program DRAINMOD, a process-based model originally created to model drainage in agricultural land, to include a presentation of data with a high temporal solution.  

DRAINMOD is the program Rob used to develop a procedure for modeling long-term hydrology in bioretention systems as part of his PhD. In this article, the group at UT-Knoxville utilized the data from the sites he monitored as part of his research to verify the performance of their updated model, DRAINMOD-Urban.  

Urbanization causes fundamental shifts in hydrologic partitioning within watersheds, leading to excess runoff being quickly routed to nearby conveyances. This leads to a host of concerns, from flooding to water quality impairments. To combat these effects, bioretention systems are implemented to restore more natural hydrology in the urban environment. To better understand and predict the effectiveness of these interventions, there is a need for reliable hydrology models to assess the performance of bioretention cells prior to installation. DRAINMOD-Urban was developed to produce hydrographs with a high temporal resolution, showing substantial promise during initial testing. 

Read the full research paper in the November 2022 issue of the Journal of Hydrology.