Cities gave a lot to sciences, they are, partially, the product of science an technology, but technical sciences does not study very much cities, … maybe. Fletcher et al., (2013) can be a short review of the topic for beginners.
When hydrologists think to cities often they do not directly think to the built environment, and the way the models has to be adapted to simulate the urban water cycle.
Fact checking shows that just a few models are present around the world that are concerned with the topic. At least recently and in major journal. An exception is Joshua Cantone and Arthur Schmidt work, who have an approach very similar to mine, and Schmidt is steadily adding material to their first ideas.
Actually we, as engineers, we are also concerned on how these infrastructures can be designed (for a literature review, see my presentation
here). As my students knows, I try to use a geomorphological approach to the problem, and
I developed a model called Trento_p to design culverts and the relates sewage. I also wrote a couple of paper on it (in Italian). However, I grow a sort of dissatisfaction or not being able to deal with the whole set of measures that constitute the center of the modern view that aims to develop
sustainable cities.
First impression is that its hydrology is really outdated. However, since it has many features that I like, in a pragmatic perspective, I could use it with students, while my groups, on the ashes of the old Trento_p, builds a new model.
An update (2018-01-18)
Recently I came across the work of
Aditi Bhaskar (
GS), which addressed the urban hydrology issues "from below", meaning considering the effects on urban groundwater. The perspective is very interesting and complementary to the surface waters one.
Another update(2019-10-10)
Interesting is the approach used by
this project, called Virtual Water, which deals with the applications of virtual reality to Urban Drainage Systems.
References
Bhaskar, A.S. and C. Welty (2012),
Water Balances along an Urban-to-Rural Gradient of Metropolitan Baltimore, 2001-2009, Environmental and Engineering Geoscience. 18(1), 37-50. doi: 10.2113/gseegeosci.18.1.37.
Bhaskar, A.S., C. Welty, R.M. Maxwell, A.J. Miller (2015),
Untangling the effects of urban development on subsurface storage in Baltimore, Water Resources Research, doi: 10.1002/2014WR016039.
Bhaskar, A.S. and C. Welty (2015),
Analysis of subsurface storage and streamflow generation in urban watersheds, Water Resources Research, doi: 10.1002/2014WR015607.
Bhaskar, A.S., L. Beesley, M.J. Burns, T.D. Fletcher, P. Hamel, C.E. Oldham, and A.H. Roy (2016),
Will it rise or will it fall? Managing the diverse effects of urbanization on base flow, Freshwater Science, 35(1), 293-310, doi: 10.1086/685084.
AS Bhaskar, DM Hogan, SA Archfield,
Urban base flow with low impact development, Hydrological Processes 30 (18), 3156-3171
Kexuan Wang (advisor, A.Schmidt) ,
Hydrologic response of sustainable urban drainage to different climate scenario, M.Sc. Thesis, 2015
Morales, V. M., Quijano, J. C., Schmidt, A., & Garcia, M. H. (2016).
Innovative framework to simulate the fate and transport of non‐conservative constituents in urban combined‐sewer catchments. Water Resources Res., 1–53. http://doi.org/10.1002/2016WR018807
Rigon, R., Bertola, P. -
La progettazione con un metodo geomorfologico delle reti di drenaggio urbane, II Conferenza Nazionale sul Drenaggio Urbano, Palermo, 10-12 maggio 2000
Sanzana, P., Gironás, J., Braud, I., Branger, F., Rodriguez, F., Vargas, X., et al. (2017).
A GIS-based urban and peri-urban landscape representation toolbox for hydrological distributed modeling. Environmental Modelling and Software, 91, 168–185. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2017.01.022
