The Performance of Vegetated Swales for Urban Stormwater Pollution Control

Vegetated swales are becoming a common feature of water sensitive urban design, acting to remove pollutants, and attenuate flows. Despite their increasing popularity, there is relatively little rigorous information available about the performance of vegetated swales, and its relationship to design parameters. Much of the information which is available, lacks the degree of experimental control necessary for use in performance modelling. The swale performance data have also been used to develop and calibrate a first-order kinetic decay model (known as the k-C* model), which forms part of the Universal Stormwater Treatment Model being developed by the Cooperative Research Centre for Catchment Hydrology in Australia. Application of the k-C* model shows excellent potential for predicting the pollutant removal performance of vegetated swales.