Handbook of Water Harvesting and Conservation

3Standards for Rainwater Catchment Design

Sisuru Sendanayake¹ and Saeid Eslamian²

¹Department of Civil Engineering, South Asian Institute of Technology and Medicine, Sri Lanka

²Department of Water Engineering, College of Agriculture, Isfahan University of Technology, Isfahan, Iran, 8415683111

3.1 Introduction

Ever since the beginning of civilization mankind has depended on water to fulfill their basic needs. For centuries, humans have used and abused the planet's water resources so much so that water has become scarce and is a precious commodity. As has happened time and again, mankind has turned their sights to the heavens, as some ancient civilizations and isolated societies in arid and semi-arid areas have done since time immemorial: looking for rain to be harvested.

Thus, in the last few decades, there has been a mounting interest in rainwater harvesting throughout the world, for both irrigation and domestic use, resulting in extensive research being carried out on the subject (McMahon and Mein 1978; Edwards and Keller 1984; Latham and Schiller 1987; Yaziz et al. 1989; Forster 1991; Butler 1993; Vale and Vale 1995; Fewkes 1999; Hermann and Schmida 1999; Gould and Niesson-Peterson 1999; Zobrist et al. 2000; Zhu et al. 2004; Roebuck and Ashley 2006; Ghisi et al. 2007; Brown 2009; Sendanayake et al. 2014; Hamdy and Eslamian 2015).

Rainwater harvesting means the systematic collection of water that rains the earth, and the proper use of it.

Rainwater Harvesting (RWH) introduces ...