Community-enabled Life-cycle Analysis of Stormwater Infrastructure Costs
The Community-enabled Lifecycle Analysis of Stormwater Infrastructure Costs (CLASIC) tool is a screening tool utilizing a lifecycle cost framework to support stormwater infrastructure decisions on extent and combinations of green, hybrid green-gray and gray infrastructure practices. The tool is hosted on the eRAMS platform which includes a geographical information system (GIS) interface and interacts with national databases to upload data for the modeled area.
Users can create scenarios of stormwater control measures including climate and land use projections to assess lifecycle costs, performance, and co-benefits associated with those scenarios.
Key Features:
- GIS-enabled
- Sophisticated and customizable graphing capabilities
- Compare and contrast multiple scenarios simultaneously
- Assess life cycle costs, performance and co-benefits
The CLASIC tool is designed for screening combinations of practices but is not intended for optimization of designs. Key components and tool outputs are described below.
Data
The CLASIC tool fetches live data from the following publicly available datasets:
- USGS National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD)
- Natural Resources Conservation Service Soil Survey Geographic Database (SSURGO)
- EPA Better Assessment Science Integrating Point and Non-Point Sources (BASINS)
Results
Three categories of outputs are provided by the CLASIC tool; life cycle costs (LCC), co-benefit analysis and performance:
Life Cycle Cost – The LCC is structured to provide feasibility level municipal budget estimates over time for a variety of SCM construction and maintenance costs.
Performance – Performance of scenarios will be estimated in terms of hydrology (e.g. peak runoff and volume reduction) and pollutant load reduction.
Co-Benefits – The co-benefits analysis will be informed via multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) output. The MCDA provides quantitative output to compare co-benefits across scenarios of technology selection.
These three components of outputs are intended to work in tandem to inform decisions on scenarios. When a user views outputs, the user will have the option to create new scenarios based on knowledge gained from the previous scenario outputs.