Agricultural and Biological Engineering

The study area, Busseron Creek Watershed, is located in southwest Indiana in Sullivan and small portion of the watershed is located in Clay, Greene, and Vigo counties. The estimated area in the watershed is 145,919 acres. The model, Hydrologic Engineering Center (“HEC-1”), is a suitable model to represent all the aspects of a watershed and to compute stream flow hydrographs at desired locations in the river basin to analyze the result. It computes runoff based on precipitation, land use, hydrologic soil group and time of concentration. HEC-1 was used to analyze the increased runoff due to land use change. A 24-hr 100 year rainfall event of 6 inches of SCS type II storm was used during the simulation process. Major land uses in the watershed consist of cropland, pastureland and forested wetlands and the site’s hydrologic soil group is B and C. A weighted curve number was calculated for each sub-watershed.The volume of the stormwater for pre-development was 93,188 cfs without ponds.Using the four detention ponds the volume of the storm water was reduced to 11,664 cfs post-development. Three ponds in the sub-watershed reduced the runoff from 27684, 51941and 74264 cfs before development to 5634, 7044 and 10552 cfs after development