The rise of urban hydrology as shown by word usage in Google’s ngrams

Can you see the Clean Water Act in there? And how much newer the phrase “green infrastructure” is?

“Growing up” as a geomorphologist, I learned about stream restoration much more quickly than I did about stormwater management, but the Google Ngrams show pretty clearly that we’ve been talking and writing about stormwater for longer and a lot more than we have about stream restoration.

This is borne out by looking at word usage just within the New York Times. Stream restoration never gets off the horizontal axis, and truthfully neither does “stormwater” management, but as two words “storm water” it’s reached levels of 0.03% of articles since 2000. It’s not much, but at least it’s there at all.