A Case Study of Rainfall Water Harvesting Effects on Runoff for Guzelyurt, Northern Cyprus

Abstract

Development of the cities and growing population significantly change the natural water cycle in urban districts and consequently increase the amount of runoff water which results in higher flood risks. For mitigating the negative impacts of urbanization on runoff, rainfall water harvesting (RWH) is proposed and applied in several regions for reducing the amount of runoff. In this study, the RWH by installing storage tanks and the methodology for studying its effects on runoff are introduced. The main objective for this study is to quantify the effect of applying RWH on reducing the pressure on the existing drainage system in order to avoid the necessity of renewing the existing drainage infrastructures. The methodology is applied on a small catchment in East Guzelyurt, Northern Cyprus as a case study, in order to investigate the effectiveness of RWH for this region. The results show that considering a 6 hour rainfall with a critical intensity of 30 mm/hr, for the selected catchment the runoff can be reduced up to ~15% in first 2 hours; however before the peak rainfall, the storage tanks get full and the runoff is not significantly reduced for the next 4 hours. The results show that RWH by installing storage tank in residential buildings for this catchment is not sufficient for reducing the amount of runoff and other harvesting methods should also be considered.