Water quality models can provide useful predictions about the flow of pollutants through a watershed. They can help develop plans and control methods for mitigating those pollutants entering the environment. Total suspended solids (TSS) are one such pollutant that can adversely affect the health of waterways. The Moore’s Mill Creek Watershed is located in Lee County in east Alabama. Rapid development in the watershed has caused a large amount of sediment to wash off into Moore’s Mill Creek, and thus it has been classified as an impaired stream under section 303(d) of the Clean Water Act. An ongoing project is built on previous research for the upper reaches of the Moore’s Mill watershed which was calibrated using PCSWMM. The model has been recently improved to include parameters for groundwater-surface water interactions assuming a uniform SWMM aquifer object to improve the description of hydrograph’s recession. This project will expand the model to include the entirety of the Moore’s Mill watershed and monitor water quality. Data will be collected at several points along the creek for water depth, water quality, stream velocity, and rainfall. Parameters for groundwater, TSS, and land use will be calibrated to best fit the hydrograph recession curves and pollutograph. A comparison will be drawn between two versions of the model that do and do not account for groundwater interactions. It will be determined how significant groundwater interactions are to SWMM predictions of surface water quality. The effects of different Land Use Land Cover (LULC) on TSS in runoff among different subcatchments will also be evaluated.
