Best Management Practices Statistical Estimator (BMPSE) Version 1.2.0

The Best Management Practices Statistical Estimator (BMPSE) was developed by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Office of Project Delivery and Environmental Review to provide planning-level information about the performance of structural best management practices for decision makers, planners, and highway engineers to assess and mitigate possible adverse effects of highway and urban runoff on the Nation's receiving waters (Granato 2013, 2014; Granato and others, 2021a,b). The BMPSE was used to calculate statistics and create input files for fitting the trapezoidal distribution to data from studies documenting the performance of individual structural stormwater best management practices (BMPs). This information was used to calculate at-site statistics that were used to calculate categorical statistics for BMP analysis (Granato and others, 2021a,b). The BMPSE was assembled by using a Microsoft Access database application to facilitate calculation of BMP performance statistics. Granato (2014) developed quantitative methods to estimate values of the trapezoidal-distribution statistics, correlation coefficients, and the minimum irreducible concentration (MIC) from available data. Granato (2014) developed the BMPSE to hold and process data from the International Stormwater Best Management Practices Database (BMPDB, www.bmpdatabase.org). Version 1.0 of the BMPSE contained a subset of the data from the 2012 version of the BMPDB; the current version of the BMPSE (1.2.0) contains a subset of the data from the December 2019 version of the BMPDB. Selected data from the BMPDB were screened for import into the BMPSE in consultation with Jane Clary, the data manager for the BMPDB. Modifications included identifying water quality constituents, making measurement units consistent, identifying paired inflow and outflow values, and converting BMPDB water quality values set as half the detection limit back to the detection limit. Total polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) values were added to the BMPSE from BMPDB data; they were calculated from individual PAH measurements at sites with enough data to calculate totals. The BMPSE tool can sort and rank the data, calculate plotting positions, calculate initial estimates, and calculate potential correlations to facilitate the distribution-fitting process (Granato, 2014). For water-quality ratio analysis the BMPSE generates the input files and the list of filenames for each constituent within the Graphical User Interface (GUI). The BMPSE calculates the Spearman's rho and Kendall's tau correlation coefficients with their respective 95-percent confidence limits and the probability that each correlation coefficient value is not significantly different from zero by using standard methods (Granato, 2014). If the 95-percent confidence limit values are of the same sign, then the correlation coefficient is statistically different from zero. For hydrograph extension, the BMPSE calculates rho and tau between the inflow volume and the hydrograph-extension values (Granato, 2014). For volume reduction, the BMPSE calculates rho and tau between the inflow volume and the ratio of outflow to inflow volumes (Granato, 2014). For water-quality treatment, the BMPSE calculates rho and tau between the inflow concentrations and the ratio of outflow to inflow concentrations (Granato, 2014). The BMPSE also calculates ρ between the inflow and the outflow concentrations when a water-quality treatment analysis is done. The current version (1.2.0) of the BMPSE also has the option to calculate urban-runoff quality statistics from inflows to BMPs by using computer code developed for the Highway Runoff Database (Granato and Cazenas, 2009; Granato, 2019).