Assessing the Hydrologic Performance of Best Management Practices

Best management practices (BMPs) are often implemented as part of drainage policies using design methods generated from uncalibrated computer models even though their in-place effectiveness has not been validated using measured hydrologic data. A procedure for determining the data required to validate the hydrologic performance of a BMP is presented. The proposed validation procedure includes eight steps: (1) develop a conceptual model of the BMP; (2) identify important hydrologic performance criteria (e.g., peak reduction, trap efficiency); (3) perform a sensitivity analysis of the model; (4) identify storm characteristics that are important to BMP performance; (5) assess the uncertainty in performance; (6) identify the type of storms needed to be monitored; (7) use statistical theory to identify the total number of storms to monitor; and (8) based on hydrologic performance uncertainty, distribute the number of storms among the important storm characteristics. Analyses showed that proper BMP validation d...