One year irrigation experiment to assess losses and runoff volume relationships for a residential road in hertfordshire,England

Six sections of a residential road (75 mm bituminous macadam over 200mm lean mix concrete over 100 mm hoggin with a recent surface dressing of 10 mm granite chippings and K1-70 binder) that drain to individual instrumented gully pots were irrigated along the kerb and then over the whole road approximately monthly for a year. The aim was the determination of terminal infiltration losses, initial losses, percentage runoff, and infiltration curves for the kerb and road surface. The results were not as expected from the literature. There is an annual cycle of infiltration losses at the kerb with a winter peak caused by frost action that is 3.2 times greater than the terminal loss rate at kerbs in summer. The terminal loss rate for an ‘average catchment’ was 6.4251 min^?1 from the road surface and 14.251 min^?1 in summer and 46.281 min^?1 in winter at the kerb. Evaporation was usually more than an order of magnitude less significant than infiltration. The wide variation in initial losses before runoff commenced was inexplicable. Two sections of road behaved in the classic manner with initial losses averaging 0.8 mm, two other catchments had highly variable initial losses in the range 1.2 to 8.8mm, and the last two pieces of road were even more erratic. The percentage runoff for those irrigations of over 15 mm of equivalent rainfall was never more than 10 per cent. The maximum per cent runoff was around 50 per cent following 10 mm of equivalent rainfall for kerbside irrigation and only 5 mm of irrigation over the whole road. There were no significant simple or multiple regression relationships between percentage runoff from the kerb or the whole road irrigations and irrigation amount, slope, UCWI, and SMD. Infiltration curves, for kerb and road irrigation, were so diverse that they do not represent the ‘simple impervious surfaces’ envisaged at the start of the experiment and described in the literature. Since the artificial irrigation of kerbs and roads has failed to substantiate existing theory, these experiments should be repeated at a variety of sites with a high rate of irrigation.