The pinelands – our highest country – are still dry.
Last year the pinelands stayed wet for 4 months.
Compare that to the wet prairies which stayed wet for 7 months, cypress for 8, and swamp forest for 9 months.
Usually those "deeper wetlands" stay wetter for longer: but this year’s spring drought quickened the pace of the water table decline.
Swamp stage is currently “normal” for mid June.
That’s a bit of a surprise considering the chart-topping rains we had in May.
Does that mean that June rains have been unusually low?
Not really:
The month isn’t over, but – at least over the Big Cypress – we’ve had our normal wet season pattern of rains.
This hydrologic mystery is better explained by the swamp water exemption to the meteorological rule (actually, it’s more of a wise tale) that “all droughts end in floods.”When the water table bottoms out as low as it did this spring, the swamp turns into a giant “dried out” sponge.
May rains always have to “re-soak the sponge” before they can “re-fill the swamp,”
Only this year, the sponge was especially thick.
That made it a tall order to "re-fill."
3 comments:
It is raining very hard here right now, so hopefully it will help the pine areas too!
nice graphics, very swampy site.
Thanks for you comments.
It rained liked buckets here in the Big Cypress today, and I saw it did over on the east coast the day before. June may end strong after all.
Post a Comment