South Carolina has recently experienced a severe drought followed by an extreme flooding that was initiated October 1, 2015. The combination of the extensive drought from the previous months followed by the historical extreme rainfall event will likely change the water quality dynamics in rural, agricultural, and urban watersheds. Specifically, the deficit in precipitation has likely led to the deposition of pollutants within the soil. During the extreme rain event and subsequent flooding, these pollutants have been discharged into waterways, with the result that stagnant water in urban areas may lead to serious issues of water quality. The drought-flood regime may affect water quality differently based on rural, agriculture and urban landscape patterns of the state. The combination of extreme events is expected only to increase, resulting in the need to advance understanding as to how these extreme rain and flooding events affect the dynamics of water quality.
The objective of this RAPID project is to collect perishable water quality related data that will lead to enhanced understanding, particularly regarding how these ever more frequent combination of droughts and floods extremes affect water quality in different types of landscape. Given the need for fast acquisition of environmental related data (e.g. the quality of urban stagnant flood waters are data that are perishable) the investigators will deploy rapid response teams to document quickly these real-time consequences of extreme floods. The scope of activities includes: a) collect water quality samples from rural and agriculture dominated watersheds following this recent historical flood event, to establish relationship between climate extremes and water quality parameters; b) collect data on stagnant urban flood waters, which may contain oil, chemicals and sewage that are a public health concern, for laboratory analysis; and c) perform sensitivity analysis to identify the water quality parameters that are mostly affected during this rapid transition from drought to flood. The combined impact of drought and flood extremes on water quality is currently not well understood. This research will bring new knowledge on the effects of drought-flood cycle on water quality at urban, rural and agricultural watersheds. The perishable data can be used to improve water quality model calibration based on a combination of extreme events scenarios. This project is anticipated to advance current knowledge on drought-flood impacts on environmental sustainability. Research findings can be applied to urban watersheds in southern and also south-western states (e.g., Texas and California) of the U.S. because of frequent combination of drought and flood events.
