Modeling of contaminant transport during an urban pluvial flood event: The importance of surface flow

A Lagrangean particle based transport model is introduced to calculate the potential contamination paths of solutes in drainage water in an urban area during a pluvial flood event. The necessity to capture the complexity of a surface runoff model and the coupling of pipe and surface are investigated. Results show that fully coupled hydrodynamic models are needed for a good representation of transport paths and breakthrough curves of contaminant concentration in drainage water. An analysis for time variation of a single location spill event is performed that shows a high variability in solute spreading depending on the spill relative to the rainfall characteristics.