Water Environment & Technology (WE&T) is the premier magazine for the water quality field. WE&T provides information on what professionals demand: cutting-edge technologies, innovative solutions, operations and maintenance, regulatory and legislative impacts, and professional development.
Who owns the rain?
is a diffuse and natural resource that falls on all land surfaces as part of
the hydrologic cycle. Harvesting rainwater is a physical process that requires
landowners to manage the impacts on downstream users.
In many cities, this practice is gaining new
visibility as a means to control wet weather management needs and provide
cost-effective, sustainable stormwater management solutions. However, water
rights precedents and allocation practices can establish legal constraints that
may limit the ability of property owners to harvest the rainwater that falls on
When it rains, it pours
Accurate measurement of rainfall is a critical
but often overlooked factor needed to evaluate the wet weather performance of
sewer systems. Poorly performing or sparsely located rain gauges can result in
significant uncertainty and error in evaluating sewers. By examining the best
management practices that several organizations have developed to gather and use
representative rainfall data, a technically based approach for rainfall
measurements is revealed.
Effects to be determined
Impact of sequester
on U.S. wastewater treatment plants still being assessed.
and removing nutrients is one of the prime regulatory drivers for water
resource recovery facilities. Achieving these increasingly stringent nutrient
concentrations to protect local waterways requires a combination of tools,
planning, and hands-on experience.
Pennsylvania, a facility created a mechanistic model to test several different
biological nutrient removal scenarios using an intermittent aeration process.
By breaking down how operational changes would affect the process, the facility
developed a powerful tool to optimize treatment.
limits also often mean new process — in the case of nitrogen limits, this
process often is denitrification, which requires readily available carbon for
bacterial conversion of nitrate to nitrogen gas. Read about the pros, cons, and
safety requirements of using methanol as this additional carbon source.
the other side of the nutrient equation, find out what every operator should
know about biological phosphorus removal in Operator Essentials.