Model archive for Assessing long-term annual yields of highway and urban runoff in selected areas of California with the Stochastic Empirical Loading Dilution Model (SELDM)

Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System (MS4) permitees including the California Department of Transportation need information about potential loads and yields (loads per unit area) of constituents of concern in stormwater runoff. These entities also need information about the potential effectiveness of stormwater best management practices (BMPs) used to mitigate the effects of runoff. This information is needed to address total maximum daily load (TMDL) regulations. This model archive describes approaches used by the U.S. Geological Survey in cooperation with CalTrans for assessing long-term annual yields of highway and urban runoff in selected areas of California with version 1.1.0 of the Stochastic Empirical Loading and Dilution Model (SELDM). In this study SELDM was used to do 368 analyses to examine highway- and urban-runoff yields for 53 runoff-quality constituents. The analyses include 222 random-seed analyses, 60 regional highway-runoff analyses, 24 regional urban-runoff analyses, and 62 focused TMDL-area analyses. Results for all these analyses are provided in this model archive. Although application of results from this study may have considerable uncertainty for predicting loads from any particular stormwater outfall, the results do provide robust estimates to support basin-scale planning-level analyses in California. These analyses also provide regional estimates inside and outside California for the 12 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency level III ecoregions that lie in-whole or in-part within the state of California.