The role of water resources engineering in our communities is becoming increasingly vital in light of our changing climate and the related impacts on water supply and control. WSP’s experts are pushing forward innovations in the form of infrastructure adaptation to counter these trends and other impacts of climate change. This includes an ongoing exploration into the range of variability to be considered in the design of surface water infrastructure and advancing green infrastructure and low impact development strategies to decentralize runoff management and better safeguard the natural environment. To help our clients and communities become more Future Ready, WSP provides new approaches for infrastructure vulnerability/risk assessments, hazard planning, flood protection system design, climate adaptation engineering, resiliency-based asset management and post extreme event recovery projects.

Holistic approaches to watershed management provide the most effective investments as we seek to provide improvements to our surface water resources. The health and function of our watersheds can be compromised by localized problem areas or by widespread impairments across communities. The WSP team excels at working with communities to understand the complexities and concerns unique to each area, performing investigations to identify the issues that strain our water resources, and developing holistic management plans to uplift the health of our surface water and our communities.

Hydrologic and hydraulic modeling is employed by our team to develop a comprehensive understanding of how rainfall interacts with our watersheds, drainage systems and rivers. They are essential tools for planning and designing improvements to surface water systems and for predicting water cycle processes. Perceiving the relationships between our watersheds, rainfall and the resultant runoff is a key step in understanding flood risks and performance along our waterways. Beyond simply tabulating flood flow rates, it is even more important that we understand the magnitude of uncertainty associated with our estimates. The WSP team is pioneering approaches to considering the interactions between rainfall and runoff and integrating uncertainty into our analysis and decision-making processes. We offer industry leading capabilities in the full range of hydraulic modeling needs from cost effective one-dimensional studies to rigorous computation fluid dynamics studies of three-dimensional flow fields. For 30 years we have been innovating — and we continue to push the leading edge — to increase the resiliency of our communities against extreme event floods.

Urbanization of our watersheds and the disruption of the water cycle by buildings, pavement and piping of drainage systems harms the quality and behavior of surface water. Interaction of rainfall with our hard infrastructure contribute to poor water quality, degrades aquatic habitat and exacerbates flood flow conditions. These disruptions change natural hydrologic patterns, accelerate natural stream flows, stop infiltration and groundwater interchange, and introduce urban pollutants to runoff. Our water resources teams plan, design and construct the full range of drainage and runoff management solutions needed to support our communities and infrastructure, and to protect the environment from our collective footprint. In urban centers, WSP specializes in the analysis of increasingly complex and sometimes aged drainage networks to understand the sources of problems, and to recommend the improvements needed to align with evolving criteria and a changing climate.

WSP’s specialists propose environmentally preferable stormwater management techniques through a variety of green infrastructure best practices, such as complete tree canopies and natural stormwater infiltration. By implementing low-impact development principles and practices, disruptions to the water cycle are managed in a way that reduces the impact of built areas and promotes its natural movement within an ecosystem or watershed. Applied on a broad scale, low-impact development techniques can maintain or restore a watershed’s hydrologic and ecological functions. Our services also include preparing before and after renderings that illustrate the outcome of implementing recommended improvements.