Stormwater Best Management Practices: Improvement and Evaluation

Each of the studies conducted herein is related to best management practices for stormwater pollutant removal. This thesis is divided into two chapters. Chapter One details the development and functionality of a novel stormwater detention pond outlet, the solid state skimmer. The device is a perforated riser having no moving parts that is capable of draining detention ponds primarily from the topmost orifices. We found that such a device is capable of reducing effluent turbidity and sediment concentrations compared to a traditional riser outlet. Chapter Two describes a water quality monitoring study performed to show that a pervious concrete detention system can remove stormwater pollutants from parking lot runoff. The stormwater flowed across asphalt paving before infiltrating into the pervious concrete and an aggregate sub-base below. We sampled the runoff before it entered the pervious and after it passed through the detention system and found significant decreases in several pollutants.