Integrated Stormwater Analysis Model to Support Sustainable Urban Green Space Design

Abstract

Abstract. Urban Green Space (UGS) has been broadly treated as a valuable and limited resource to handle the challenges brought by high-density urban environment. Green stormwater management has been prompt around the world. To reduce the potential conflicts between stormwater management and other requirements on UGS (especially human needs), the research community and governments encourage the urban planners and designers to integrate stormwater analysis into UGS design. However, the professional term and operation of the traditional hydrological model is a huge challenge to the designers who haven’t touched hydrological knowledge. This study developed a method to simulate and quantify stormwater in UGS by the particle system in the design platform- Rhinoceros +Grasshopper. In this method, we adopted five groups of urban objects such as terrain, building footprint etc. to ease procedures and performance. To overcome the issue the abstracted particle movement cannot reflect the infiltration features of land cover, we introduced categorising locations of the particles and the UGS retaining stormwater hypothesis. To test the feasibility of the method, we tested the three parameters of the integrated model: iteration times, rainfall depth ( selected rainfall event) and particle radius. The comparison tests prove: (1) too small iteration times would lead the particles to stop on the way to the bottom of the terrain, so we set at least 4000 iteration times for simulation; (2) the sensitivity to the selection of rainfall event and particle size is relatively low, the simulation results vary by 1%; (3) too small particle numbers will impact the accuracy of analysis, so we should balance accuracy and work efficiency of work; (4) the stormwater volume estimation based on the particle system is acceptable. The experiments confirm the method can effectively support preliminary UGS design work.