Quantity and Quality Data from a Stormwater Catchment in Italy

Abstract

Urban runoff quantity and quality is a major problem for the sustainable development of our cities. Up to the 1960s, little attention was given to the pollution caused by storm sewer flows. Since that time, many important programs have been set up in order to understand the nature of runoff pollution. In the United States, the most comprehensive study was the Nationwide Urban Runoff Program (NURP) conducted by EPA between 1978 and 1983. Moreover runoff pollution data were collected under the monitoring program called the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) which was established to regulate storm water point source discharges by permit requirements. Extensive investigations were also conducted in France since 1970 and the data collected on the quality of wet weather flows have been gathered and analysed in the QASTOR database. In Italy, since the 1980’s about ten experimental urban catchments have been instrumented for runoff quantity monitoring studies (Pagliara, 2000), and later the investigation has been extended also to water quality data. The University of Pisa has instrumented two stormwater basins: “Fiumetto”, for which three years of water quantity data are available and “Picchianti” with quantity and quality measurements. In the national context, the experimental catchment of Picchianti is one of the very few cases of an urban site drained by a separate storm sewer network in operation.