Permeable pavement monitoring at the Edison Environmental Center demonstration site

There are few detailed studies of full-scale, replicated, actively-used permeable pavement systems. Practitioners need additional studies of permeable pavement systems in its intended application (parking lot, roadway, etc.) across a range of climatic events, daily usage conditions, and maintenance regimes to evaluate these systems. In accordance with this research need, the EPA's Urban Watershed Management Branch (UWMB) installed an instrumented, working, 110-space pervious pavement parking lot to be used by EPA facility staff. The UWMB is monitoring water quantity and quality parameters in side-by-side pervious asphalt, pervious concrete, and permeable interlocking concrete paver systems. The parking lot consists of three monitored permeable parking rows, each with a different surface separated by conventional asphalt driving lanes. The permeable pavement parking areas have subsections underlain with an impermeable liner to collect the infiltrating water. The remaining sections are lined with a permeable geotextile liner to allow the filtered effluent to infiltrate to the underlying soil. There are four impermeable and five permeable sections for each pervious pavement type, which allows for statistical analyses of collected data. The monitoring scheme outlined here allows the EPA to document the performance of the three permeable pavements, specifically pollutant removal capability and runoff volume reduction. The possible mitigation of the urban heat island effect by permeable surfaces will be explored with conventional asphalt and unpaved soil as controls. This site is equipped for long-term monitoring and the effect of regular maintenance will be investigated by examining changes in surface infiltration rates with time.