Case of the missing tomato

Here's some aerial footage
of the Tamiami Trail from 500 ft, flying east.



Below is a photograph looking south.


The lines in the ground in the photo above
are old farm furrows used to grow tomatoes decades ago.


The funny thing about those lines is that no matter how hard I look , and as obvious as they are from the air:

I've never been able to find one on the ground.

(Nor have I ever run across a remnant tomato plant growing wild from the seed.)


Compare that to the Trail:

From the ground I can see it even better,

And green tomatoes are visible by the tractor trailer full.

Swimming season opens
with rise in gulf temperatures ...

Even if fumes from coastal Louisiana oil spill
were apparent in the strong westerly winds.
(see article)

Dry wet meets wet dry

Dry season, wet season, wet dry season, dry wet ...

It gets confusing.


Last winter (a year ago) we had a "record dry" dry season (in which under 4 inches fell from November to April).

That was followed by a "wet start" to wet season that ended on "dry note," even if for a full season (May-Oct), the 2009 wet season chimed in on the 30-year average of 43 inches ...


That puts us where we are today:

At the end of an unusually "wet" dry season.


That's turned what's usually a dry month of April into seeming more like July ...

At least that's how it looks from 500' up in a helicopter.

tree island

in Everglades Nat'l Park

April's aqua incognito

We knew it was a wet winter,
But now we can finally make it official:

The swamp has moved into Aqua Incognito.


What I mean to say is that we’ve set a new “high water mark” for April.

Never before, in the past 20 years of record keeping, has swamp stage been this high this late in the dry season. Preserve-wide swamp stage is 15 inches higher than our late April norm and over 3 feet higher than last April this time.

Of course last year was a record dry season drought.


This year has been a “wet” dry season instead.

So wet in fact that – at least terrestrially – it may go down as a rare “Year without a Dry Season,” not unlike the watery winter half that sutured 1994 and 1995 into a single mega-season of flooding (with an exclamation point at the end with an especially “wet” 1995 wet season).


During a typical year the “wetting front” drops out of the pinelands in November, the marl prairies in February, the cypress in March, and the inner pond apple swamps by May.

This year the pinelands went dry early – in October – but that’s about it:

The rest of the swamp mosaic has stayed wet.


Only four more weeks the “meteorological” wet season will be here …

Terrestrially speaking – knee deep in a dome – it feels like it never left.


Click HERE to see a rainfall chart for your basin.

on S-78 looking down river

The rise and fall of S-79

Too much ... not enough ...

The goal on discharges down the Caloosahatchee, into the estuary, down from the S-79 WP Franklin Lock and Dam is to get it "just right."

What is "just right?"

The optimal range is between 300 and 800 cfs. That's the "skinny dark gray" line if you're looking at the data calendar above.

The management goal, from the perspective of a monthly mean, is to keep freshwater flows between 300 and 2,800 cfs. That means anything color coded "yellow" or higher is too much and anything coded as a "skinny light gray" line or lower is not enough.


This year so far the S-79 has been below that magic number, but has let loose around 300,000 acre feet in the process.

That adds up to 120 Empire State Building sized glasses.

Compare that to 1998 when five times that amount of freshwater (720 Empire State Buildings) discharged into the Caloosahtachee estuary from January through April.


It's 2005 that was the big flow year on record (thanks to a 20-inch June rainfall tally and an active hurricane season).

All said and done that year added up to 1,600 Empire State Buildings.

Or in Acre Feet almost 4 million.

That year was also the "knock-out punch" on three consecutive years of mega freshwater discharges. The duration and magnitude of those "blow out" events is shown by the "fat gray-shaded bands."




Since then flows have mostly fallen
in the acceptable range ...

Other than a few excursions into "not enough" territory (i.e., springs of 2007 and 2008).


What's the recipe for sustained optimal flows? More upstream storage for one ...

Until then a good amount of luck from the weather will have to do.



(Here's a recent article on Lake releases.)

Gulf of Mexico

Hotlanta ... really?

Which is hotter:

Naples or Atlanta?

If you go by the 80° F standard, Naples broke that plane for the better part of 7 months ...

Compared to only 3 for Atlanta.


On the winter side of the scale, Atlanta gets a true "season's worth" of continental cold air (that sends weekly-averaged night-time lows below 32° F).

Only rarely – once or twice per year, and sometimes none – do night-time temperatures in Naples break that plane.


That begs the question:

Why "Hotlanta" and not "Coolanta" instead?


For one its a name attributed to its "social" climate, just not meteorological.

Second, Atlanta is land locked:
it doesn't have a sea breeze ...

Nor does it have Florida's ubiquitous afternoon cloud cover nor its regular late-day wet chill of cumulonimbus showers.


That makes Atlanta seem hot (and humid) even by south Florida standards.

rain barrel

"Brother can you spare a gallon?"

My water bill (plus sewer) costs me around $900 per year.

That’s for an average household usage
of 5,000 gallons per month.


While it may seem
sort of expensive at first:

It is quite a bit of water.


Per month we go through 120 water barrels (42.5 gallons each) and per year we use 5 swimming pool equivalents …

That’s going by the lap pool in my back yard. Measuring in at 15’ wide x 30’ long x 3.5’ deep, it holds around 12,000 gallons.)


Now imagine I had to order all that water to my house
by truck delivery (at the going rate of $9 per 5 gallon jug) instead …

That adds up to $108,000 per year.


Talk about a a big "jump" in prices!

charred pine island

Grand unifying theory of swamp

So much for old theories!


I had a previous notion that the spring "green out" erased the winter contrast of green (slash pine) and gray (cypress).

Or in other words:
Nothing but a mess of green.


A recent prescribed burn redrew those lines, this time in a vivid study of burnt sienna brown (slash pine) and shamrock green (cypress instead) instead.


Not that old assumptions are bad:

The grand unifying theory of the swamp
consists of many layers.

sugar sand
and pure
cane sugar

"Brother can you spare 14 million acre feet?"

Paynes Prairie sprung a leak,
Or so the history books tell us …

And Lake Okeechobee didn’t,
No matter what the local papers say.


How is it then that water levels are down 100 feet behind good old Hoover?

(Hint: Think dam not dike.)


This is no lie or legend,
It’s the truth:

Water levels behind Colorado River’s Hoover Dam are down 100 feet from the late 1990s.

Did a sinkhole open there instead?


This isn’t a case of water sneaking out,
But rather of it not getting in:

Not enough snow melt …
Plus a change in the regulation schedule.


It’s not a river you know – but rather a river system – with reservoirs and distribution canals up and down its length.


Prior to Glen Canyon Dam going in the early 1960s (and Lake Powell filling up behind it), the Colorado River sent an annual flow of between 4 and 20 million acre feet through the Grand Canyon.

The modern era has seen it hold mostly steady at just around 9 million acre feet per year.


Lake Mead holds about 28 million acre feet of water when filled
(that’s about 5 Lake Okeechobee volumes),

But currently only stands at about half that.


The West has a lot of places to put water, but not much rain.

Compare that to flapjack flat south Florida:
Lots of rain but no river canyons to store it in!

Paynes Prairie

Giant sinkhole swallows Florida

It happened to Paynes Prairie ...




Could a giant sinkhole drain Lake Okeechobee too?

(This 1981 Sarasota Herald Tribune article raised the possibility ... even if the evidence sounds like seepage underneath the levee to me.)


As far fetched as the title sounds, it has a ring of familiarity to a more recent article (three days ago) featured in the Wall Street Journal likening Plant City sinkholes to earthquakes and volcanos.

Florida may look flat ...
But its geologic history (and mysteries) run deep!

looking up

Higher and deeper than you think

The cypress domes aren't just
the lowest lying spots in the swamp ...

They are also the highest reaching.



I've never been a dome and thought:

"Wow, it's flat in here."


Two feet of water in the swamp is deep ...

Especially in April.

efforts are underway

to strengthen the levee

One big lake (... just not deep)

Lake Okeechobee is big and shallow,
With an annual fluctuation that’s quite small …

Right?

While it is big (looking more like a Gulf than a Lake from its levee), and could be characterized as shallow (it’s only 15 feet at its deepest spot – Big Cypress Swamp’s Deep Lake is 6 times deeper), it has the widest fluctuation of any other surface water body in south Florida …

Even Water Conservation Area 3,
(which I’ve wrongly regarded as the deepest instead).


I just had to plot them both on the same axis.


Lake Okeechobee is currently 3 ft higher than April of last year and a half foot above the 20-year median for mid April.

That puts it under the 66th percentile for the month ...
Or about average (based on the 20-year record).


Water Conservation Area 3A is 1 ft higher than April of last year, and also a half foot above the 20-year median for mid April ...

That puts it above the 90th percentile for the month.

That's based on its regulatory stage, which is an aggregate of three stations (Site 63, 64 and 65). Click HERE to see the hydrographs and historical data for those individual stations.


As for Deep Lake, it's about as deep as its ever been in April ...

It's just not very big.

storm-water outfall

Lake releases to east coast

How do current releases through the S-80 compare to the historic record?

Here’s a look:

The S-80 is the coastal release point for sending freshwater into the St Lucie Estuary.

This spring (so far) appears as little more than a blip on the historical flow chart.

Only one week to date has averaged over 1,000 cfs for a full 7-day period. While that’s an increase from the past few springs, it barely registers as a trickle in the bucket compared to the mammoth spring releases of 1998, 1983 (both El Niños) and 1970.

Nor does it compare to the consecutive high flow summers of 2003 through 2005 when release rates consistently topped 4,000 cfs for weeks on end.



Of course they were the flows that knocked the estuary severally out of balance.

The focus today is trying to return the estuary back to ecological health.



Towards that end the US Army Corps of Engineers is working with stakeholders to keep requisite releases from Lake Okeechobee as low and temporary as possible ….

Weather permitting of course.

(Click here to see article.)

saw palmetto at rim trail bridge:

it spans an ephemeral streambed

that feeds water to the unquenchable

Devil's Millhopper

Subtleties of saw palmetto

More Devil's Millhopper ...


Saw palmetto along the rim
(of the nature trail),


Needle palm at the bottom
(of the sinkhole)



Non-botanists in watersheds everywhere thank there lucky stars for these sort of signs!