CLASIC: A Stormwater Planning Tool for Green and Gray Infrastructure Comparisons
By: Tonya Bronleewe, Director, Wichita State University Environmental Finance Center
When it comes to stormwater planning, communities often struggle with the gray vs. green infrastructure question. Aligning level of service and sustainability goals with current funding, and then balancing the short and long-term impacts can be a difficult puzzle. The CLASIC online stormwater planning tool was developed to help communities determine the extent and type of green, gray or gray-green hybrid stormwater control measures that are right for the development or redevelopment project area.
Released in April 2021, CLASIC helps stormwater professionals, community planners and local decision makers assess geographically targeted comparisons of stormwater management scenarios. CLASIC lets communities compare customized stormwater technology scenarios through various lenses: construction costs, maintenance and rehab costs, runoff volume reduction, pollutant removal, social benefits, climate change, and MORE.
While developing CLASIC the Project Team incorporated stakeholder engagement pieces like interviews, user stories, beta testing and case studies to ensure that CLASIC provided the functionality, technologies, customizable data and output features that would best serve the tool users.
Why Use CLASIC?
CLASIC allows stormwater planners to find and make the case for green and/or gray stormwater technologies using lifecycle costs of construction, maintenance and rehabilitation; hydrologic performance; and environmental, economic and social co-benefits.
How Do You Use CLASIC?
- Identify your project area on the interactive map
- Select your climate data and modify default parameters as needed
- Build scenarios with green and/or gray technologies
- Select co-benefits you want to assess
- Set targets (pollutant reduction, runoff reduction or cost) as needed
- Run the model
- Analyze, print and share outputs (tables, graphs, etc.)
CLASIC Does Not...
- Assist with site specific design
- Compare spatial distribution of technologies
- Provide design optimization
Check out CLASIC
- CLASIC Link: https://clasic.erams.com/
Log-in feature allows users to save and return to projects over and over again.
- CLASIC Video Tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3OyYQXPKnXZnSKAl8LSW-bM9hrsDdbYu
CLASIC outputs provide users with customizable graphs that compare scenarios by lifecycle cost, various technology performance measures and co-benefits. Graphs can be saved, printed and copy and pasted into presentations.
A big congratulations to all the CLASIC Team Members for the development of a great tool! Thank you to The Water Research Foundation for leading the Team.
The creation of this tool was funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Office of Research and Development (ORD) through the grant opportunity “National Priorities: Life Cycle Costs of Water Infrastructure Alternatives” (EPA Grant Number: R836173). Additional information about the project is available through the EPA.