Utility of Stormwater Monitoring

Abstract

Stormwater runoff is now a major contributor to the pollution of coastal waters in the United States. Public agencies are responding by requiring stormwater monitoring to satisfy the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System stormwater permit. However, studies to understand the utility of the current programs or to improve their usefulness have not yet been performed. In this paper, we evaluate the land‐use‐based program, the industrial stormwater permit program, and beach water‐quality monitoring in the County of Los Angeles, California, to determine if the results will be helpful to planners and regulators in abating stormwater pollution. The utility of the program has been assessed based on the programs' ability to accurately estimate the emissions for different classes of land use. The land‐use program appears successful, while the industrial monitoring program does not. Beach water‐quality monitoring suffers from a lack of real‐time monitoring techniques. We also provide suggested improvements, such as sampling method and time, and parameter selection.

Regulating Industrial Stormwater: State Permits, Municipal Implementation, and a Protocol for Prioritization1

“…That information is not available. The best available monitoring data from the NPDES regulatory program has been demonstrated to be poorly correlated to any industry characteristics, which researchers have largely attributed to the loosely controlled sampling and reporting methods allowable under the permits (e.g., Lee and Stenstrom, 2005; Duke and Yeager, 1999). No other monitoring data of which we are aware has assessed facilities of a sufficiently large sample size to draw conclusions about the effect of particular on‐site activities or P2 measures on pollution in runoff.…”

“…This observation may be a partial explanation for the lack of correlation observed in previous studies between industry sector and pollutant load or concentration, as reflected in routine stormwater discharge monitoring (e.g., USEPA, 1995; Lee and Stenstrom, 2005). The absence of the expected correlation has commonly been attributed to the poorly controlled nature of the data available under the monitoring system, especially in the Lee and Stenstrom study.…”

Evaluation of stormwater BMPs for implementing industrial stormwater permitting strategy

“…It was, however, difficult to distinguish stormwater quality of industrial sectors from Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code using the current water-quality parameters (Lee & Stenstrom, 2005). Our previous study also shows that the industrial stormwater general permit (ISGP) data for Los Angeles County have the highest coefficient of variation among the various water data (Lee et al 2007) as shown in Figure 2.…”

“…Significantly, the associated stormwater monitoring programs, an essential component of any NPDES permit, have been ineffective and have been of little utility in demonstrating compliance (Lee & Stenstrom 2005). In practice, these permits promote the use of USEPA benchmarks either for triggering changes in monitoring activity or as a self-evaluation tool.…”

Quantifying the quality and sampling time of oil and grease in urban stormwater runoff

“…Thus, stormwater quality monitoring programme conducted at different land uses will help to evaluate the relative importance of specific land uses as pollution sources for O&G (LADPW, 2000). Generally, Event Mean Concentration (EMC) was used to characterize the stormwater runoff quality (USEPA, 1983;Charbeneau and Barrett, 1998;Lee and Stenstrom, 2005). EMC value can be calculated from flow-weighted composite sample or a series of grab samples for a particular storm event.…”