Steven J. Burian

University of Utah | UOU · Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Nonstationarity of rainfall extremes and urban land cover pose uncertainties for local stormwater managers attempting to address urban flooding. Due to the recent attention focused on adapting urban drainage design to rainfall intensity modification from climate change, impacts from land cover changes due to infill and redevelopment have not been a...

This study aims to address the gap in quantified stormwater RTC performance to battle climate change.First, this paper introduces the resilience computation, model and datasets, and RTC strategy. Second, this work provides results and discussion of the impacts of RTC on urban flooding resilience under varying rainfall events. Thirdly, this paper co...

The frequency and magnitude of urban flooding events are increasing due to climate change and urbanization. Predicting urban flooding becomes important to reduce flood-induced environmental damage, economic and life loss. This study developed a sequence-to-sequence Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) neural network to predict the outflow of a drainage ca...

Harmful algal blooms (HABs) are a recurring problem in Utah Lake, and particularly massive blooms in recent years have received national attention. The onset of blooms is important to a wide variety of stakeholders from members of the public who recreate and come into contact with HABs to monitoring agencies who are tasked with tracking water quali...

The growing population and increasing development in Salt Lake County over the coming decades are a major concern for water resource management in the area. Changes in water use that accompany changes in population and development have several potential cascading effects on both supplies and receiving waters. Some of these effects include drawing f...

Designing urban water infrastructure systems for environmental sustainability requires consideration of hydrologic performance design criteria and results from life cycle assessment (LCA). The objective of this paper is to present a study of merging hydrologic and LCA criteria into the evaluation of the environmental sustainability of rainwater har...

Water distribution systems (WDSs) recovery methods have been assessed primarily using hydraulic deficit. However, hydraulic deficit does not reflect all performance goals needed to effectively guide resilience strategies. In this paper, a new approach is presented to measure resilience based on the idea of economic consequence loss in businesses du...

Future precipitation projections—and subsequent variation in simulated runoff response—can have a large impact on the planning and design of hydraulic structures and water systems and are, therefore, an important input in hydrologic modeling. These projections are often derived from coarse-scaled climate models and may require downscaling and bias-...

The Jordan River Valley urban water system (which includes Salt Lake City) depends heavily on a series of mountain streams and reservoirs which are highly sensitive to snowpack and snowmelt patterns. We review the effects of changing patterns from two perspectives: 1) Dust deposition and 2) Changing climate. Dust deposition results in reduced refle...

This paper describes impact of flood depth on the transportation system in Houston, Texas. Generally, bad weather simultaneously impacts on derivers, by reducing visibility, and also the conditions of vehicles and roadways. These effects cause reduction speed and increasing density in roadways, so transportation agencies are seeking to integrate (o...

This study demonstrates a number of methods for using field sampling and observed lake characteristics and patterns to improve techniques for development of algae remote sensing models and applications. As satellite and airborne sensors improve and their data are more readily available, applications of models to estimate water quality via remote se...

This chapter presents an approach for using multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) to study the tradeoffs of rainwater harvesting (RWH) system designs. Three scenarios have been designed and evaluated. Each one captures rainwater from the rooftops of the connected Civil and Materials Engineering (CME) and Hedco buildings on the University of Utah...

The combined actions of natural and human factors change the timing and availability of water resources and, correspondingly, water demand in metropolitan areas. This leads to an imbalance between supply and demand and, thus, an increase in the vulnerability of water supply systems. Accordingly, methods for systematic analysis and multifactor asses...

Population growth, urbanization and climate change stress the need for alternative water systems and food production areas. Fresh produce is imported from distant agricultural areas, whereas water availability is decreasing due to droughts or poses a threat due to sudden and intense rainfall events. In this context, the implementation of urban agri...

This paper presents a study of the potential for green infrastructure (GI) to restore the predevelopment hydrologic cycle in a semi-arid urban catchment. Simulations of stormwater runoff from a 0.11-km² urban catchment in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA for predeveloped (Natural Hydrology, NH), developed (Baseline, BL), and developed with GI (Green Infra...

Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) infrastructure are conventionally designed based on historical climate data. Yet, variability in rainfall intensities and patterns caused by climate change have a significant impact on the performance of an urban drainage system. Although rainwater harvesting (RWH) is a potential solution to manage stormwater in urban...

Most stormwater models oversimplify evapotranspiration (ET) processes, which restricts their applications in water budget analyses, ecosystem services assessments, and coupled modeling studies such as with urban climate models to investigate benefits of green infrastructure (GI) implementation. To address this need, the Penman–Monteith scheme was i...

Rainwater harvesting (RWH) has often been used as a water infrastructure adaptive measure to mitigate water supply shortages due to droughts. Recently, RWH has received increasing attention owing to its other ecosystem services like stormwater management and groundwater recharge. However, the tradeoff among those ecosystem services to cost and soci...

Rainwater harvesting (RWH) is being used more often today as a water supply and stormwater management green infrastructure (GI). In recent years, GIs in urban water engineering have gained attention due to their lower lifecycle costs—in both implementation and operation phases—rather than traditional gray approaches. The research described in the p...

This study evaluated impacts of Green Infrastructure (GI) as a stormwater management practice on return flows and the further Implications of climate variability. The goal was to create a model to explore the impacts that bioretention and Rainwater Harvesting (RWH) representing GI had using goldsim and Stormwater Management Modeling (SWMM) software...

In response to climate change, vulnerability assessment of water resources systems is typically performed based on quantifying the severity of the failure. This paper introduces an approach to assess vulnerability that incorporates a set of new factors. The method is demonstrated with a case study of a reservoir system in Salt Lake City using an in...

As universities and colleges seek to integrate sustainability into a broad range of programs, degrees, and certificates, they must overcome traditional academic silos, disciplinary boundaries, and funding constraints. This requires an unprecedented level of curricular innovation, creative funding streams, and directed facilitation of cross-campus c...

Availability of a safe and reliable water supply is an issue in developing nations, including India. Rainwater harvesting (RWH) is a site-specific source control used to satisfy human, agricultural, and safety demands for water. This study analyzed the effects of capturing rainwater for a 12.5 year period (Jan 1999–Jun 2011) to provide three ecosys...

There has been growing focus on the impact of dust deposition on the hydrology of snowmelt-fed watersheds. Recent studies have indicated that dust deposition can vary the albedo or reflectivity of snow, leading to changes in the melt dynamics and subsequent variations in the flow rates of mountain streams. Lower albedo causes the snow to melt soone...

From water to energy, and from climate change to natural hazards, the geosciences (marine, Earth, and atmospheric science) have an important role to play in addressing a wide range of societal issues, with particular relevance to how humans can live sustainably on Earth. Although arguably important to developing solutions for many societal issues,...

A common challenge in teaching sustainable design is the need to incorporate knowledge and skills from multiple areas of expertise. This paper describes an approach taken to meet this challenge with a collaborative learning experience that combines students from two institutions. Students from CVEEN 6460 Sustainable Urban Water Engineering at the U...

doi: 10.1061/(ASCE)HE.1943-5584.0001064

doi: 10.1061/(ASCE)IR.1943-4774.0000770

Climate change is projected to have significant impacts on patterns of weather variables all around the world. To study the impacts of climate change on rainfall, different global climate models (GCMs) and climate scenarios are used to build projections for probable future patterns of rainfall. Using the rainfall projections, the change in runoff p...

Climate change can alter rainfall runoff regimes in urban areas by changing rainfall patterns and consequently increasing runoff peaks and volumes. Low impact developments (LIDs) and green infrastructure techniques are strategies that can be employed to control and decrease stormwater runoff in urban areas. In this study the potential for green inf...

In the United States, there are approximately 84,000 dams including approximately 14,000 dams that are classified as high hazard. Approximately 50% of high hazard dams do not have an emergency action plan (EAP), a document describing potential emergency conditions and potential areas at risk of flooding. A critical data set required for identifying...

This study presents an analysis approach using an existing Monte Carlo (MC) flood risk framework to compare annualised risk reductions from flood control alternatives targeting various recurrence interval events. The annualised risk approach is demonstrated by analysing the relative flood risk mitigation benefits of flood proofing in Swannanoa wate...

This paper presents the results of a long-term, continuous hydrologic simulation analysis of a watershed-scale residential rainwater harvesting (RWH) program in the Chollas Creek watershed, San Diego, California, USA. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) simulated rainfall-runoff responses for variations in...

Assessing climate change risk to municipal water supplies is often conducted by hydrologic modeling specific to local watersheds and infrastructure to ensure that outputs are compatible with existing planning frameworks and processes. This study leverages the modeling capacity of an operational National Weather Service River Forecast Center to expl...

The significance of uncertainty analysis (UA) to quantify reliability of model simulations is being recognized. Consequently, literature on parameter and predictive uncertainty assessment of water resources models has been rising. Applications dealing with urban drainage systems are, however, very limited. This study applies formal Bayesian approac...

This article presents an analysis of the projected performance of urban residential rainwater harvesting systems in the United States (U.S.). The objectives are to quantify for 23 cities in seven climatic regions (1) water supply provided from rainwater harvested at a residential parcel and (2) stormwater runoff reduction from a residential drainag...

The use of interactive video conferencing (IVC) and related technologies to teach courses over the Internet is becoming more common. The typical model for a distance-learning course is a single instructor teaches students distributed in remote locations connected via IVC technology and a web-based learning management system to facilitate interactio...

In recent years, decentralized approaches in urban water engineering have been studied due to their low environmental impacts and their ability to control stormwater quantity and quality in urban areas. In this paper, sustainability aspects of decentralizing urban water infrastructure systems have been studied through a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) so...

Evapotranspiration (ET) generally receives little attention in urban stormwater modeling, which often assumes a constant ET at monthly or seasonal intervals for an entire city area. However, unlike natural environments uniformly covered by pervious areas that accumulate and store rainwater for ET and infiltration, using the constant ET value to est...

Urban runoff and evapotranspiration (ET) are the major components of urban water cycle. The former links with the urban water use, groundwater recharge, and pollution transport. The latter reflects water loss back to atmosphere from urban water cycle, and greatly impacts the accurate estimation of other components such as the urban runoff. The two...

This study presents a new Monte Carlo-based flood inundation modelling framework for estimating probability weighted flood risk using a computationally efficient graphics processing unit (GPU) two dimensional (2D) hydraulic model. The 2D flood model is programmed in the GPU framework providing a unique ability to run numerous simulations in a short...

This paper presents advancements to the approach for Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) development in Korea. The current Korean TMDL process does not directly consider uncertainty and it does not include an objective approach to allocate pollutant load reductions. This paper develops a methodology to address uncertainty by incorporating a margin of s...

This paper presents a study of the computational enhancement of a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) enabled 2D flood model. The objectives are to demonstrate the significant speedup of a new GPU-enabled full dynamic wave flood model and to present the effect of model spatial resolution on its speedup. A 2D dynamic flood model based on the shallow wate...

The objective of this paper is to introduce a continuous simulation-based screening procedure for ranking urban watershed management alternatives using multi-attribute decision making (MADM). The procedure integrates continuous urban runoff simulation results from the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s Storm Water Management Model (SWM...

Rainwater harvesting has emerged as a sustainable technological solution to address multiple urban water management goals. Recognizing that current technical knowledge and guidance with respect to the benefits of the technology for use as a stormwater management best management practice (BMP) is limited, the Rainwater Harvesting Task Committee (RWH...

Harvesting rainfall has been practiced since ancient times around the world, and remains common in many countries today. The concept is recently gaining new interest in urban areas in the United States (U.S.) because of its potential to meet multiple sustainability objectives including reduced water demand and managing stormwater runoff. However, t...

Permeable pavement has been used successfully for many years to provide stormwater control and has recently become a common feature in low impact development (LID) projects. Recently, the potential benefits of pervious concrete over traditional impervious concrete and asphalt pavements for reducing surface temperatures, sequestering carbon, improvi...

This paper presents an assessment of the 3B42 research version rainfall product from NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission Multi-satellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA). The study provides new results of TMPA data accuracy in urban areas and highlights trends associated with the climatological indicators of temperature and relative humidity in...

According to the national inventory of dams (NID), there are approximately 79,500 dams in the United States, with 11,800 of these dams being classified as high-hazard. It has been recommended that each high-hazard dam in the United States have an emergency action plan (EAP), but it has been found that only about 60% of the high-hazard dams have a c...

Emergency flood management is enhanced by using models that can estimate the timing and location of flooding. Typically, flood routing and inundation prediction is accomplished by using one-dimensional (1D) models. These have been the models of choice because they are computationally simple and quick. However, these models do not adequately represe...

The objectives of this paper are to (1) present the approach used to integrate sustainability content into the civil engineering curriculum at the University of -, (2) assess the effectiveness of the approach, and (3) provide general recommendations to improve the integration of sustainability into the civil engineering curriculum. The approach bei...

Based on the need for advanced treatments of high-resolution urban morphological features (e. g., buildings and trees) in meteorological, dispersion, air quality, and human-exposure modeling systems for future urban applications, a new project was launched called the National Urban Database and Access Portal Tool (NUDAPT). NUDAPT is sponsored by th...

Information on urban morphological features at high resolution is needed to properly model and characterize the meteorological and air quality fields in urban areas. Here a project called National Urban Database with Access Portal Tool (NUDAPT) that addresses this need is described. NUDAPT is designed to produce gridded fields of urban canopy param...

This paper presents a two-step process to estimate the fraction of an urban watershed covered by a hydraulically effective impervious area. The first step applies maximum likelihood classification of fine-scale multispectral satellite imagery to derive urban land cover. The second step uses an automated macro in a geographic information system to t...

A finite difference formulation of the shallow water equations using an upwind differencing method was developed maintaining computational efficiency and accuracy such that it can be used as a fast-response flood estimation tool. The model was validated using both laboratory controlled experiments and an actual dam breach. Through the laboratory ex...

Landscape changes induced by urbanization have been found to influence urban water cycle components including evapotranspiration (ET), runoff and water use. For instance, residential areas in semi-arid regions with vegetation subjected to lawn watering have higher ET rates when compared to the other areas in an urban environment. This increase asso...

Population in Utah is projected to nearly triple in the next 50 years, to more than 6 million people. Although Utah has a small overall population compared to some other states, several regions of the state rank among the fastest growing locations in the country, with the Washington County area in the southwest corner of the state consistently rank...

Potential effects of urban areas on rainfall patterns have been studied and recorded in the archived literature since 1921 when Horton observed rainstorm development over two cities, Albany, New York, and Providence, Rhode Island, which he attributed to the presence of the urban areas. Since then the implications of urbanization effects on climate...

This paper describes a multidiscipline team-taught course providing a project-based learning environment for students of sustainable design practices at the university level. The Sustainability Practicum course developed by the authors at the University of Utah aims to integrate students from multiple disciplines with faculty and design professiona...

Urban aerosol particulates may play a fundamental role in urban microclimates and city-generated mesoscale circulations via its effects on energy balance of the surface. Key questions that need to be addressed include: (1) How do these particles affect the amount of solar energy reaching the surface and resulting surface temperature? (2) Is the eff...

The unit hydrograph is a common tool in hydraulic design. Used correctly, it allows a design engineer to estimate a runoff hydrograph from a drainage basin given a rainfall event. The typical method for estimating a unit hydrograph for a gaged watershed is by deconvolution. However, distinct storms produce different unit hydrographs for a single wa...

This paper presents a GIS-based 1-d distributed overland flow model and summarizes an application to simulate a flood event. The model estimates infiltration using the Green-Ampt approach and routes excess rainfall using the 1-d diffusive wave approximation. The model was designed to use readily available topographic, soils, and land use/land cover...

This paper describes the features of the databases included in the National Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (NUDAPT). The Houston prototype of NUDAPT contains three-dimensional building, airborne LiDAR digital elevation model (DEM), derived gridded urban canopy parameters (UCPs), derived micrometerological physical characteristics, land use/...

This paper introduces a remote sensing-based approach to rapidly derive urban morphological characteristics using radar satellite data. The approach is based on the expectation that the magnitude of the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) backscatter can be related to urban canopy parameters (UCPs) describing the height, density, and roughness of buildi...

A simulation environment is being developed for the prediction and analysis of the inundation consequences for infrastructure systems from extreme flood events. This decision support architecture includes a GIS-based environment for model input development, simulation integration tools for meteorological, hydrologic, and infrastructure system model...

A suite of urban databases are being developed by researchers at the University of Utah and Los Alamos National Laboratory. The primary application of the databases is atmospheric transport and dispersion models, but other fine scale modeling applications, e.g., air quality modeling, meteorological modeling, climate modeling, hydrologic modeling ar...

This subject, Urban Wet-Weather Flows, is comprised of three basic subareas - combined-sewer overflows (CSOs), sanitary-sewer overflows (SSOs), and stormwater discharges. Major proceedings related to wet-weather flow (WWF) published during 2005 were the ring following: (1) WEFTEC 2005, 78th Annual Conference and Exposition (WEF, 2005); (2) Effectiv...

Characteristics of short duration rainfall events have essential application in the design of hydraulic structures. In order to derive various design values, hydrologic data is generally assumed to be time-independent or stationary. Significant changes in land cover could be a source of non-stationarity of flood characteristics and lead to incorrec...

Effective watershed management requires an accurate assessment of the pollutant loads from the associated point and nonpoint sources. The importance of wet weather flow (WWF) pollutant loads is well known, but in semi-arid regions where urbanization is significant the pollutant load in dry weather flow (DWF) may also be important. This research com...

Los Alamos National Laboratory is compiling and building tools to simulate infrastructure stability following damage events as part of the National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC). The Water Infrastructure Simulation Environment (WISE) project is an analytical framework providing simulation capabilities for drinking water dist...