Rainless spring bloom

It’s spring time in south Florida!

And I don’t need to see the green out to prove it:

Just look at the historical temperature chart for Naples.

Winsberg defines spring as the time when the average daily daytime high temperature rises above 75º F.

That’s already happened here in Naples.

It won’t happen up in Tallahassee for another month … and tack on another few weeks after that for the maritime fringe of the Florida Panhandle. (It’s downright Tundra-like up there in Pensacola!)

Up on Cape Cod, I only remember three seasons: winter went running straight up into summer, followed by a delightful fall. Spring didn’t exist.

Compare that to Tucson, Arizona. They just had their first day in the 90s last week. They have two seasons: one a noun (summer) and the other a verb (winter), both of which are hot – but it’s a dry heat.

As for the green out, that's as much an artifact of the recent prescribed wild lands fires as it has to do with the rise in temperatures and daylight hours.

The northern expression -- “April showers bring May flowers” -- doesn’t apply in south Florida. 

It hasn’t rained in months, but we’re greening out anyway.

Our wild flowers are our wild (and prescribed) fires ...

Followed by the bloom.

Call of the water

Every hydrologist has to start somewhere.

Mine was in The Mudderland – officially known as Harford County, Maryland.



At some point in my late teens, overwhelmed with utopian vision that the corruptible world would never find a chink in my armor, I slipped out the backdoor and left her fertile waters behind … for good.

Or so I thought.

The Mudderland finds a way to pull you back. First in a fleeting flash that you brush aside, quickly returning to your business … only later to be interrupted by her whisper in an intermittent wind that blows through the trees above, which you duly note, then casually put off … until months (sometimes years) later, in a palpable sense of longing you can no longer deny – let alone shake off – you find yourself accelerating into a mad dash – back through time and space, even into the fifth dimension – to land back at her soggy shores, kneeling down to drink heartily from her running waters, and know once and for all (and yes, how could it have ever been otherwise) that all is forgotten and equally forgiven: 

The Mudderland was always there waiting from the moment I first left!

In short, I guess what I am trying to say is that I attended my 20th year high school reunion.

That was back in November.

Here’s a short video clip from that trip – of Kilgore Falls of the Falling Branch tributary.



Downstream it feeds into The Mudderland’s central flow way and hydrologic standard bearer – Deer Creek.  Then it flows into the lower stem of the Mighty Susquehanna and on into the Chesapeake Bay.

Big Cypress skyline

As the winter eases into spring, here's a look back at an endless view of cypress near the end of fall, back when the only green in town (or this case, the swamp) were the slash pine islands and hardwood hammocks.

(Notice towards the end of the clip how we dip into the center of a dome.  That gives a good perspective on how big the trees are.)

 

It's a beautiful thing to see the Big Cypress Swamp from the air.  

It's not too bad from the ground either.  

Cloud shadow

We've had our fair share of clouds this dry season.

It's just the rain-producing variety that we've been missing ... 

As if we're trapped in a rain shadow.

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Dry season bailout

Have you ever turned your head away for a few moments, only to return to see that everything has changed?

That’s exactly what’s happened to me here in the Big Cypress.



Out of nowhere water levels have dropped to the bottom of the barrel.

Preserve wide stage is a solid 8 inches below its normal late February norm, as based on the 15 year average.



All summer we were running above the average.

Fay gave us the big rain day bounty, but one storm does not make a summer wet season. A wet streak in early October had our summer sheetflow lapping up at the shoreline of the mesic pinelands – our high ground – up until the start of the dry season.

In theory, that was our water in the bank for the dry 6 months to come.

No rain and 4 months later water levels have sunk to the last and lowest of our wetland habitats – our pond apple swamp forests.


Now we’re a few inches away from having that summer bounty completely spent!

To be sure we still have some low-water refugia pools. They stay wet even when the swamp apple forests go dry. 

And the canals are still holding water. The visitors love it because it’s easy to view the wildlife, but it’s never a safe mix to have wading birds and gators congregating close to motor traffic.



Our only bailout now is the blue sky above. 

Here’s to hoping blue skies turn gray and a dry-season continental front is on the way.

Otherwise it’s a long (and dry) wait to mid May and the start up of the wet season.



By the way, the photos were taken on Groundhog Day when the wetting front was still flooding up at the edge of the cypress domes. Three weeks later it's a long -- and often fruitless  -- walk into the domes to find water.

Freeze thaw

The spring thaw is upon us.

That’s a bit of a stretch for Naples Florida since it never – or rarely – freezes in the first place, and when it does, it’s just for a few hours in the waning hours before dawn.

By thaw I meant warming.



Average daily lows and highs are on the upswing. 

Here in Naples temperatures bottom out in mid January with an average daytime high of 75º F and nighttime low of 53º F.

They’re seeing the same warming trend “up north,” case in point being Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (see graph).

The only difference is that Pittsburgh is still frozen. 

Average night time lows are in the mid 20s. The good news is that average daytime highs have risen 10 degrees over the past month. They’re now in the mid 40s.

Compare that to Naples two coldest days of the year – January 21st and February 5th. You know it’s a rare day in Naples when daytime highs never make it above 60º F. In this case it was close: 56º and 58º F respectively.

You can see that if you click into the historical calendar graph below.



On one of those days I was out at Picayune Strand – braving the cold. That’s where I took the photo below. It used to be a man-made channel called Prairie Canal, but now it's been transformed into a series of ponds to put water back into the adjacent wetlands.

As cold as it was, it never froze (not even close).

Up in Pittsburgh, they're still waiting on their ponds to thaw.

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The Great Swampy

The "Ashlands" from the previous post is a head nod to one of my favorite authors and books: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.  The Ashlands were the gray wasteland the characters sped across from point A to point B -- New York City and the Hamptonesque East Egg, Long Island -- and back again.  

More largely the "Ashlands" worked as a metaphor for the age in which they lived: the roaring '20s ... and the desolation that lie beneath its guilded facade.  

Tamiami Trail has the same sort of traffic flow.  Motorists traveling from coast to coast (point A to point B) -- Miami to Naples and back again -- eyes glued to the windshield, many with little idea what they are passing on the side view.

Whether in its summer swamp stage all filled with water or newly turned to ashes after a winter burn, the view is always the same to those drivers: 

A vast terra incognita (full of alligators and snakes) that needs to be crossed.  

Do we live in a similar age?

If you've driven down Gulf Shore Boulevard in Naples and had a look at the beach-side mansions, you'd say "yes."  

So would Jay Gatsby.

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Ash lands

A few views in the days following a prescribed burn in Big Cypress National Preserve, south of Tamiami Trail. If you look closely you can see the Trail in several photos. Sometimes the burns are "patchy," but not this one: it left a moonscape of ash, and marched through cypress and pine lands alike. Soon enough with spring it will green out.  (It's already doing it.)

Trendy lines

Sometimes hydrology is trendy.

And I’m not talking about the “trend lines!”

When water levels start rising off the chart or dropping to the bottom of the barrel … everyone is looking, worrying, or trying to come up with an answer on how to get it going the other way.



But once they drop down to medium, no one seems to care.

My brand of hydrology of course is that I never stop looking … as best I can.

Case in point is over in the Everglades at Water Conservation Area 3A. 

Fay pushed it up into the high country of the tree islands in September, and then it got another push a few weeks later, putting it at 4 feet deep in early October.

That had everyone looking, and waiting, and wondering … what’s going to happen when we get the next storm arrives.

It didn’t.

But I kept watching.

Water depths in southern 3A are currently around 2.5 feet deep. That’s as deep as you’ll find water anywhere in the Everglades. 

That’s even “wet season” deep in Big Cypress right next door, for which you’d need a divining rod to find water now:

It’s mostly dry as far as the eye can see in the land of cypress.



When’s the last time it went dry over in 3A?

Answer: 20 years ago (1989).

Green flash

So you've never seen a green flash?

This is exclusive footage you will not want to miss.

The green flash is an optical illusion of sorts -- the phenomena is closely related to the "green dot" you see when you close your eyes after looking into a bright light.

But don't get me wrong: green flashes are also real.

To see one you have to be equally patient and persistent ... that means lots of arduous visits to the beach at sunset.

And like anything else, just when you've all but given up, and all but dismissed the so-called "green flash" to the great trash bin of unexplainable atmospheric chimera (such as UFOs) ...

That's when the it appears -- in an instant of an instant -- all in a flash -- vividly green ...

Then its gone.

In the meantime, enjoy the video.

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Dry season stack up

How does this year’s dry season stack up against others of recent note.

The graph below shows that both literally and figuratively.



The dry season of 1997-1998 was our wettest in recent history. That was the year of the second El Nino of the Century. The first such dubbed El Nino occurred in 1983. It had a dry season soaking of similar magnitude.

But it proves a point: don’t go making a call before the race is over, or in this case, the millennium is done – it still had 17 years to go!

Naming something “of the century” is often a subjective enterprise anyway. In this case the primary metric of measurement used is the amplitude of the pulse, not its duration.

If we went by the latter, a good case can be made for the extended El Nino that lasted from 1992-1995. 

It never rose to the epic amplitudal heights of 1983 or 1998 (as measured by the ENSO index), but Florida State emeritus Morton D. Winsberg points out – author of Florida Weather: it’s the long lasting El Ninos that produce some of Florida’s biggest dry season drenchings, often starting in their second year.

If you haven’t noticed, this year’s dry season has been pretty rainless.

It’s not all that unsimilar to the first 4 months of last year’s dry season.

The difference ends abruptly there, thanks to last year’s mid February Big Rain Day. 

It was a cold front storm for the ages – blanketing Big Cypress National Preserve with 5 inches of rain.

That’s not quite Fay … but almost.

Maybe the better comparison for this year’s droughty dry season is the winter of 2000-2001.

And it goes to show, dry season are more about episodic drenchings – the coveted Big Rain Day – than regularly spaced storms that produce steady averages.

The defining characteristic of our dry season is that it’s our seasonal drought. The big question mark in the air is when and if that blue sky will be unpredictably punctuated by a Big Rain Day, or a pattern of stationary fronts.

It’s those events that make up for the other dry months. They are our stop gap dry season measure that keeps the seasonal drought in check until the giant meteorologic switch in the sky is flipped back on and the summer rains return.



Unless it’s an El Nino.

In that case you can count on a steady parade of dry season rains …

Most of the time.

Winter the adjective

Winter is not just a verb (see previous post), it can also be an adjective -- as in "winter" beach.

Here's a visual comparison of summer and winter beach in Naples, Florida.

The first few clips are from September -- which is still summer in Naples -- and also the end of our wet season ... so the clouds are threatening, but the surf is calm and the air is warm.

Compare that to winter beach filmed yesterday.  

On this day the wind was stout -- a kite worthy sky and a surf full of chop -- and by Naples standards: cold and blustery.

To throw a monkey wrench in the works, there was a burly fella swimming in the gulf, and then afterwards, walking along the surf line soaking wet and not seeming to mind.

"Let me guess, you must be visiting from somewhere north of the Arctic circle?" I asked.

"Close, Minnesota!" He responded.

It was a summer beach to him.

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Winter the verb

The term “winter” is not a noun in Naples, it’s a verb – as in the sentence:

"Northernors 'winter' in Naples to avoid real 'winter.'"

So when they visit during our winter dry season, they have certain expectations about sun and clear blue sky – and, most of all, no excuses!

Sometimes the skies aren’t so accommodating.

Case in point was our recent spell of fog … or was that smoke from a fire?

The truth is in south Florida … sometimes it’s both.

The smoke is mostly from prescribed burning in the Big Cypress and Everglades. Moisture conditions have been just right for controlled burns.

And meteorologic conditions have been just right for fog, caused by a stationary front up near Lake O that’s been siphoning tropical moisture from the south and a temperature inversion that’s keeping cold air at the surface.

That’s formed a fog bank off the coast that rolls onshore during the evening.


Saturday afternoon it was brilliant blue sky at our house, and hot. We hopped into the car for the 5 minute drive to the beach.

Halfway there ran into the fog bank.

Talk about a micro climate!

The air turned cold and damp, and since a sunset was now out of the question, we turned back – Plan B it would be: Sudgen Park. 

But even there we had to dig deep into the trunk to find every spare article of clothes we had.


The next day we made it to the beach and got our blue sky.

But out on the water, in the distance, sneaking in from the horizon – the fog bank was back on the prowl.



Or was that smoke?

Sometimes in south Florida we get both.

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Cloudless

Just another cloudless dry season day on the outskirts of Fakahatchee Strand.

Honeybells are for eating

On a recent visit to a local Honeybell stand, a familiar bystander – recognizing me as a hydrologist, and also knowing me as Bob – inquired into how it is that the flows of a river can be measured:

“The streams seem so big, and there’s so much water passing through. You can’t possibly catch it all.”

Pausing to think, I picked up an orange, or in this case not an orange at all, but a honeybell – and a member of the Tangelo family no less – and proceeded to explain.

“The first thing I ever used to measure flow was an orange, if you can believe it, up on Deer Creek in Harford County Maryland. We’d plop it in the creek from the deck of a bridge and count in seconds how long it took to move downstream.”

I paused for thought again, and in doing so raised up the bell shaped tangelo up to the light.

“Of course, you’d never use a Florida Honeybell for such a task! They won’t float – too much juice (the good ones anyhow) – they’ll sink right to the bottom.”

“But you could use one as an anchor” I added “if you’re out there in a boat.”

My friend interrupted -- “So what your saying then is that you use boats to measure flow in the Everglades?”

“No way” I laughed, glad to be able to clear up any misconception. “During Honeybell season not only do we not have flow, we barely have any water to float a boat on!”



“But even if we did: a Florida Honeybell is 100 percent for eating. Always use a California orange to measure flows. They have a thicker skin, not as much juice – and quite frankly aren’t as sweet.”

At least to a Floridan.

Kissimmee's final stop

Here's a short video clip of the S65E, the Kissimmee River's final stop before it spills into Lake Okeechobee.

The good news is that the river is still flowing, at around a hundred or two cubic feet per second.

Back during the drought of 2007 the Kissimmee went flowless for 9 months, delivering a subpar annual flow volume of around a quarter a million acre feet of water to the lake.  The lake holds around 4 million acre feet at optimal wet season capacity.  

That explains the record drop down in the lake back in 2007: 

Over two million acre feet evaporate from the lake each year -- courtesy of the sun, but the lake only gets half that amount from rainfall.  The upstream spigots -- of which the Kissimmee is the biggest, make up the difference. 

It was a return to normal last year (2008), with a one million acre feet delivery from the Kissimmee.

But the year ended on a dry note (as it was on the day I was there filming) -- and as is typical with the November arrival of the winter dry season.  It's been mostly blue skies ever since, with not much rain, through the first two months of 2009. 

Currently the lake is holding just over 3 million acre feet of water.

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Lake at big halfway

Here’s an update on Lake Okeechobee.

It’s now dropped down about 2 ft in the 5 months since it crested back in mid September, in the weeks following Fay.

Waters are slowly receding back to its pelagic center, but we still have 2 feet of water in the lake-adjacent marshes before the littoral zone goes completely dry.

That happens at 11 ft.




Lake stage started 2009 at a relatively high level: 14 ft.

Compare that to 2007 – the lake’s record drought year – when it started the year 2 feet lower, at 12 ft. That year, the lake proceeded to drop at a precipitously steady rate of 7-8 inches per month through May, until eventually bottoming out at 8.8 ft in late June – its all-time record low.

Or compare it to 2008 when the lake started out of the gate in January a full 4 ft lower than this year’s “new year” level – at an alarming 10 ft. Incredibly, despite a prevailing La Nina (usually associated with drier-than-normal dry season), the rains came … and kept the lake level through mid May.


That was a stroke of unexpected good fortune, as water managers were making preparations for a dire drop off of the Lake, with contingency pumps and special water restrictions being put in place.

But you know how the weather is – just like the water below – it has a mind of its own.  

The bigger picture – if we stand back and look at the historic data set – is that the lake is in a dry period: it’s been over 3 years now since the lake rose above 16 ft, and is only a half year removed from a 17 month plunge below the 11 ft mark.

That’s it longest such plunge below the littoral zone on record.

Second on the list is its 7 month slide below 11 ft back in 2001.

We were calling that one the drought of the century at the time it was unfolding. As it turned out we got two droughts of the century all in single decade.

What’s in store for the rest of the dry season?

The Lake is still living off of the prodigious rains from Fay, but with the second and hotter half of the dry season ahead of us, it’s going to be a race to the finish to see if and when it drops below 11 ft before the summer rains start back up.

And don’t forget that a La Nina now climbed back on the radar screen.

Blame it for our lack of dry season rain, and dropping Lake O’s stage at the same pace of the 2007 dry season.

But it’s an inch by inch “slow motion” fall.

And all it takes if for one or two continental fronts to change the outlook in the blink of an eye.

Case in point was last February’s five inch Big Rain Day.

That rewound the water cycle clock back a good 2-3 months down in Big Cypress National Preserve.

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