Occoquan Watershed Monitoring Laboratory

The Occoquan Watershed Monitoring Laboratory (OWML), Manassas, is responsible for making determinations in a number of areas critical to the ongoing management of water quality in the Occoquan watershed, situated on the southwestern periphery of the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. The basin encompasses six political subdivisions, including portions of four counties, and the entire land area of two independent cities.

OWML determines the suitability of reclaimed water for indirect discharge into a public water supply. Since its founding 32 years ago, OWML has been successful in building a hydrologic and water quality data acquisition and analysis system that have formed the basis of regional watershed management decision-making. The system has made it possible for local governments of northern Virginia to successfully deal with the competing uses of urban development (and the attendant wastewater discharges and urban runoff) and public water supply in a critical watershed-impoundment system.

Research projects are conducted jointly with other Virginia Tech faculty and with investigators from a wide range of other institutions, including other research universities and public agencies in the Commonwealth of Virginia and elsewhere.

Generally, research activities at OWML are organized into the following categories:

• Reuse of reclaimed water to supplement potable water supply
• Physical/chemical limnology of lakes and reservoirs, with a particular interest in the mitigation of water quality impacts due to human activity
• Sediment-water interactions in lakes and reservoirs
• Characterization and control of nonpoint source and urban runoff pollution, including the development and validation of Best Management Practice (BMP) technologies
• Modeling of stream and reservoir systems, with a particular emphasis on sediment and nutrient transport and fate in the transitions between upland, riverine, lacustrine and estuarine systems
• Development of web-enabled, GIS-based, environmental information acquisition, analysis and query systems to support near real-time decision-making
• Integration of geospatial information technologies into the solution of environmental problems in water quality management, planning and development at the watershed scale