HURRBIS: a French national approach for urban hydrology supported by local authorities

Over the last twenty years, French researchers in urban hydrology felt the necessity to work on long time series of rain, discharge and pollutant loads in sewer systems during wet weather in order to improve our understanding and modelling of such systems. In order to reach this objective, they have launched, in three French cities, experimental sites named “observatories in urban hydrology”.

OPUR (Observatoire des Polluants URbains, i.e. the observatory of urban pollutants) has been created in the Paris area, in 1994, by researchers from the LEESU which is a laboratory belonging to Paris Est University.
OTHU was created in Lyon in 1999 by researchers of the LGCIE which is a laboratory of INSA Lyon, in association with other laboratories in Lyon.
SAP/ONEVU (Observatoire Nantais des EnVironnements Urbains, i.e. the Nantes observatory of urban environments) was created in Nantes in 2006 by researchers of LCPC which is a public laboratory specialised in civil engineering and public infrastructures.

OPUR, OTHU and ONEVU work mostly on the same topic: they analyse the whole urban water cycle, from the atmosphere to the ground, including the in-between steps like networks, discharges, pollutant transfers, surface waters and aquifers, etc. A great part of their budget comes from local authorities, so the kind of data obtained depends on both i) research interest and ii) local management’s concerns about storm water and wet weather discharges and pollutant loads.
Over the years, other research teams have joined the founding members in each city and research projects mainly focused on pollutants in urban areas and their impact on the aquatic environment. 

In 2007, a seminar on data acquisition in urban hydrology was organised by OPUR. At the end of this seminar, the researchers decided to create an informal network, in order to enhance relations between the different sites. This network has been named HURRBIS. It aims to become a special place for researchers and city engineers to share their needs and to work on operational solutions. It also promotes and facilitates communications between both parties and helps to link scientific questions to management issues. Scientifically, the network presents an opportunity for the observatories to integrate their local projects and to share methods, data and outcomes.

Specific activities undertaken at the HURRBIS level:
- A website has been created: http://www.Hurrbis.org.
- Two joint PhD theses have been launched, one about turbidity measurement and its use for TSS loads modelling, the other one to explore the possibility to develop continuous measurement devices for micro pollutants.
- A study is on the way to define the specifications of a joint data bank for the three sites.
- Recently the HURRBIS network has been officially labelled as a SOERE (“Observation system for research and experimentation in environment) by the French Ministry of Research and Higher Education.  The Name of the SOERE is URBIS.

As the HURRBIS network is relatively young, goals and functions still have to be fully implemented. One possible development consists in expanding the scientific domain of HURRBIS to other fields of the urban environment. Another one is to ensure that the network will last a sufficient time by involving the elected people in an inter-communities structure supporting the network.

This last development has to face an important question: can we deal with issues such as water management on a wider scale, or are the issues and problem-solving deeply and inevitably linked to local areas and contexts?
The HURRBIS inter-observatory network aims at building models and planning tools which could be both global and locally adapted. Is this ambition realistic?