Six more weeks of "tourist season?"

By continental standards, south Florida doesn’t have a winter …

Does that mean we don’t have a Groundhog Day, either?

European ancestor of Punxsutawney Phil, as seen at a Zoo in Germany

Groundhog Day marks the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, or in other words – it’s the mile marker on the calendar that celestial winter is halfway through. Up north on the snowbound parts of the continent that makes it a day of eager anticipation. Tradition has it that if Pawnsxatawny Phil emerges from his hole to see the sight of sunny skies (and more importantly – his shadow) then an early spring is on hand. If skies are cloudy and his shadow is no place to be found, plan on six more weeks of winter instead.


Here in Florida the underlying assumption of Groundhog Day falls apart …

Especially the farther you go south:

Snow birds in flight (figuratively speaking)

We don’t have any snow nor do we even have a “winter season:” we call the cool half of the year the dry season instead. Our cold spells are “here today, gone tomorrow,” quite literally only lasting a day (or two), never a week consecutively (or only rarely) and even on those the core part of the cold brunt only skims shallowly below the 32 Fahrenheit mark ...

Truly “freezing” temperatures persist for a few hours at most.


So, if winter doesn’t exist then neither does Groundhog Day, too … right?

The caveat is that more “winter the noun” on the continent translates into more “winter the verb” on the south peninsula. Thus if Punxsutawny Phil doesn’t see his shadow, that could equate into more northern snowbirds flocking south to Florida’s sunny shores.

Snowbirds take roost over warm Florida waters (also figuratively speaking)

Or in other words,

Six more weeks of peak Tourist Season for the Florida peninsula!

Fern and pond apple

Resurrection fern turned verdant from the recent rains,
as shown growing on a pond apple tree

The fern who cried water

Are all swamp plants hydrologically alike?

Take for example the story of the pond apple tree and the resurrection fern it supports. (Resurrection fern is an air plant which is commonly found on pond apple branches.)

Recent rains splashed a fresh hue of green over the fern yet a look at water on the forest floor shows waters still remain very low instead.

Why the difference?

The thirsty swamp needs a full summer’s worth of rain to fill its cup up to the brim whereas the frugal-minded fern can get by on just a few drops.


Not quite an Aesop’s Fable (i.e., The Boy who Cried Wolf) but close.

Long shadow of the winter cypress

Days are growing longer:
Can the green out be far behind?

Non-existence of snow (until it melts)

The higher you move north on The Continent …

The longer it takes the winter-spring high flows to kick in.

That’s because all the water is “freeze dried” in cold storage,

But there is no escaping the spring eventually.


For the “Everglades of the North,” aka the Red River basin, as featured at the U.S. Geological Survey’s flow gauging station in Fargo, North Dakota, the melt kicks in between March and April …

Raising river discharge a good order of magnitude in the process.


That left me wondering if the river’s noticeable amplification of flow over the past two decades (as shown in blue on the graph) has something to do with an earlier melt? What I see from the graph is that timing of the melt remains unchanged over the decades. Additionally, the increase in discharge seems consistent throughout the entire year, and not just associated with any one season.

Meteorologist Daryl Ritchison points to precipitation instead. The yearly total has risen from the 18 inches in the 1970s inches to closer to 23 inches since 1993.

Red River of the south?
Ridge and slough landscape of the Everglades in October 2010

That goes to show how far a little extra precipitation will go …

Or in other words, out into the floodplain.


The Red River valley is as flat as the Everglades you know!

Flat forest

Marl prairie with dwarf cypress with Tamiami Trail in background:
As seen in the air in a helicopter near Oasis looking south.

Tale of the tilted table

How flat is the Big Cypress Swamp?

The swamp is flat and also titled, although not nearly as much as this table

As flat as a table, but also slightly titled.

That’s what makes it flow.

Water's edge

As of January, water has dropped into the domes

Primordial panther paws of time

The swamp looks primordial during the summer wet season ...

As if at any moment a dinosaur will emerge from behind a palmetto stand.

View of a dry marl prairie in January 2011:
pine islands in the background and a circular marsh in the front

During the winter it looks like the dry-open plains of the Serengeti.

Only instead of lions we have panthers.

Somewhere between 100 and 200 at last count.

Click on map to view rain charts

Rain-fed swamp

The Big Cypress Swamp averages around 53 inches of rain per year.

About 42 inches falls during the summer wet season (as indicated by blue segments in the bar chart below) and another 11 falls during the dry winter half as coded on top of blue in yellow.

This bar graph shows yearly rainfall in monthly increments:
Blue segments show wet season months and yellow show dry season months.

This year has been on the low side of normal.

The wet season came in short with only 35 inches and since then the winter "dry season" has been just that:

Not much rain.

The rain chart above does not include totals from Tuesday night's rain

Not that a couple continental fronts couldn't change our outlook,

But as of now we may be in store for only 40 inches for the year (as tabulated from May 1st through April 30th).

Cypress meets marsh

Can you see the solar panel?

Weather alert!

This could change everything:
Continental cold front brings evening of heavy rain!

Swamp hydrograph turns back years

Every year is a little different in the swamp.

Here’s an animated hydrograph that displays the past ten.

Which ones were the most memorable?

The summer of 2005 really jumps out in my mind. That wet season started fast out of the gate with +20 inches of June rain and it ran strong through the fall with a hurricane season that just wouldn’t die. And who could forget Fay in August of 2008. It soaked the entire state (except Tampa) from head to foot and inundated the swamp well up into the pines.

Even more memorable for me was an epic dry season deluge in February of 2008. It flushed water well up into the marl prairies in what had appeared, up until that point, to be an early and deep dry down towards spring. The flood waters were all the more ostentatious because the ground vegetation in the prairies was thin and dormant in its threadbare winter state.


Nor will I soon forget seeing one of the swamps deepest spots, Sweetwater, go bone dry in May of 2009 (so much so that we were able to walk through the culverts)!

Sweetwater May 2009

How does this winter rate?

The swamp appears well on its way to an early dry down. Current swamp stage has dropped to the bottom of the tall cypress. We usually don’t see that happen until the middle of March. That makes this year’s dry down similar to what we saw during the winter droughts of 2001 and 2009.

January 2011

Last year of course we didn’t have a dry down.

Water flat-lined in the cypress all dry season long.

Cypress to pond apple transition

Aerial view of dome shown below.
Where the trees are tallest in the middle is where it opens up into a pond apple forest.

This cypress dome gives way to pond apple trees in its middle (right), not marsh

Shallow waters in tall cypress

Waters have dropped to the bottom of the tall cypress.

View into the center of a dome

These two photos were taken at the interior edge of a giant cypress dome where the tall trees abruptly dead end into the deeper water middle of an open marsh.

Cypress encircle a multi-acre marsh

Other times you'll find pond apple forests in the middle of the domes instead.

Surf clam

A common site on Myrtle Beach:
These shells were as big as my palm at thick too.

Is it snow if it doesn't stick?

Snow rarely falls, let along "sticks," on the Florida peninsula ...

But it did cover 70 percent of the continental Lower 48 earlier in January, as reported by Daryl Ritchison in his StormTracker blog.

A blanket of snow covered Charlotte earlier in January

Above is is a photo of snow on the ground in the vicinity of Charlotte, North Carolina during that "70 percent" event. Below is an animated map of this winter's snow fall to date, courtesy of NOAA.



I didn't have the chance to walk through that snow since I never left the terminal: a connector flight took me to Myrtle Beach where the white stuff was already gone.

But there was plenty of ice.

Water in its solid state as seen in Myrtle Beach.
Hint: Naples may be a better beach to visit in the winter!

Deserted beach town

January is a slow month in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina

Winter rates in reverse

When you see a sign saying “winter rates” in Naples, Florida …

You can expect to pay double.

Winter rates in Myrtle Beach, SC are the same as summer for Naples, FL

The same sign in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina means you can probably pay half price instead. That’s because Myrtle Beach is a spring and fall town, whereas Naples peak season is in the dead of the continental weather instead.

Winter invades coastal Carolina

How cold does South Carolina get?

Cold enough to freeze up its fountains, but not cold enough to cover its flower beds. The reason for that, presumably, is that blankets only work a couple degrees on the other side of zero, not for the deep plunges into the low twenties and teens you get on the Continent.

High risers block the shine of the morning sun making for a shivery walk

Even colder still was walking on the west side of the high rises along the beach.

The tall buildings blocked the sun leaving nothing but very shivery shade!

Freeze lays waste to uncovered flowers

as seen in Myrtle Beach, SC after last weekend's deep freeze

Swampy sea of shallow cypress

Everyone's heard of the River of Grass ...

But does the swamp have a cypress equivalent?

Answer:

Yes, we call it Mullet Slough.

Dry or damp season, instead?

It's felt more damp than dry this past week:
Tamiami Trail near Garnett Strand looking east

North today, south tomorrow

Here’s a look at a hydrograph for the St Johns River …

As measured by the U.S. Geological Survey at Deland.

How low can it go?  In the case of the St Johns River, in reverse!

The green background shows its long-term 25-year statistics. The dark green band in the middle shows what you could consider its normal flow. The dotted white line in between is the median. The funny thing about this hydrograph isn’t how high it gets (it high-water peak is around 10,000 cubic feet per second), but rather how low it sinks.


For the St John’s that doesn’t mean “zero,” but lower still.

Or in other words, reverse flows!

By comparison, the Kissimmee River never flows north.

And don’t forget:

Deland is a good 150 miles inland from the river’s Atlantic mouth.


So yes, the St Johns River is Florida’s only north flowing river …

But sometimes it also flows south.

Florida's northernmost river

St Marys River is the hydrographic dividing line between Florida and Georgia

Florida's northbound river

The best seat on an airplane is always the window …

Especially on a clear day.

View from above of Crescent Lake.
To the east in the background is Florida's Atlantic Coast.

Here’s a photo I took late last week of Florida’s Crescent Lake. It feeds into the St Johns River ten miles or so downstream of Lake George. Off in the background you can see the Atlantic Ocean in the proximity of Flagler Beach.

As the bird flies the two water bodies are about 25 miles apart.


As the river flows – in this case to the north with lots of twists and turns – the distance to the Atlantic Ocean is around 80 miles instead.

Mouth of St Johns River near Jacksonville

Not that Atlantic hangs around waiting: During low water saltwater can intrude and reverse flows as far as 160 miles upstream from the river’s mouth.

9 nights drop below 40 ...

That only happened 5 times all of last winter.

A friendly ghost called Florida fog

Florida doesn’t get snow …

But we do get a good dose of winter fog.

Often it occurs when we get stuck with a stationary front.

That brings in humid air which as day cools into night condenses over land.


I can usually count on a slow ride into work the next day. Visibility is too low to even think about passing on the one-lane road I ride, let alone maintaining a high speed.

Fog tends to be a tough subject to photograph

Then by 10 am the sun burns it off back into blue sky.

Be sure to drive safely until then (and after)!

Honeybells up close

Honeybells are a hybrid between a tangerine and a grapefruit, not a true orange

Honeybell weather

What, if anything, do Honeybells have to do with hydrology?

After all, citrus and water don’t seem like a natural fit.

Honeybells on display outside in January

Honeybells are probably the most prized citrus of all the Florida orange crop – in part because of their delectable taste and also because they are seasonally quite rare: peak Honeybell season last just a few weeks in January.

However, these globules of orange gold can be stored through February, and one year I even saw them on display at a local grocer in March. But that’s rare. The best ones in their purest form are found fresh off the vine near the start of the year.


Gradually over time the Valencias move in on the shelf.

They are also very juicy but more pulpy, have many more seeds and aren’t anywhere near as sweet.

Valencies on display inside in late March

Or in other words,

Winter is over and spring has begun.


It’s a sad feeling for us in Florida to see the Honeybells go. That means winter – if in fact we have one – is gone too, and that summer-like temperatures are on their way. So enjoy them while we still have them – both the Honeybells and the cooler days.

Exoskeletons great and small

Horseshoe crab carapace at Naples Beach

Cemetery surf

Shells along the surf
are sort of like the boneyards of the gulf:

They are the dead exoskeletons of what were once living creatures of the sea.


This photo it turned out to be literally true:

Can you see the actual bone?

Of what we are not sure but hope to find out.

Gulls take flight

What's wrong with this picture?

Two things are jump to mind:

One is the Brazillian Pepper - an invasive exotic which crowds out natural flora - and the other is the Tamiami Canal which shunts water away from where it aught to be.


What's sort of eye grabbing is how both are so picturesque ...

At least on this photo, that's how they appear.