Pacific Southwest?

As rainy as our wet season is – we typically average 43 inches of rain from late May through early October –

We can usually count on mornings being mostly sunny.

Usually, mornings are mostly sunny ...
Even when along the coast there may be clouds.

Not this week:

The weather pattern has a distinctive Pacific Northwest feel.

The start of September could get a boost
from the stationary wave in the Gulf

Last word from the weather bureau is that it’s not going anywhere soon.

That could means more all-day clouds and rain into the start of September ...


And some extra cups of coffee just to stay awake!

Can you count the 5 anhingas?

Under "the low rainfall plan, S-333 target flow
has the potential to flow to the eastern part of the L-29 Borrow  Canal
and result in seepage to L-31N rather than flow in the slough."

"Eastern part of L-29 Borrow Canal"

Confluence of L-29 Borrow Canal and L-31N Canal

How to open a gate

Here’s an email that only an engineer could love:

"Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE 

This memorandum summarizes operations to be performed on the S-12 structures in Water Conservation Area 3A (WCA-3A). Reference is made to the discussion between ------ and ------- on Wednesday, August 24, 2011. The rainfall plan target flow for this week is 150 cfs. 

The 3-Station Average for WCA-3A shows water levels are in Zone E of theWCA-3A Regulation Schedule. Due to the small rainfall plan target flow this week and Everglades National Park's desire to maintain the water in the slough, the rainfall plan target flow will be delivered via S-12D. From information provided by ENP, it is understood that the low rainfall plan S-333 target flow has a potential to flow to the eastern part of the L-29 Borrow Canal and result in seepage to L-31N rather than flow in the slough. 

Therefore, the Corps of Engineers South Florida Operations Office (SFOO) is requested to make the following S-12 operations on Thursday, August 25, 2011. 

S-12 GATE CHANGES
S-12A: FROM ALL GATES CLOSED TO NO CHANGE
S-12B: FROM ALL GATES CLOSED TO NO CHANGE
S-12C: FROM ALL GATES CLOSED TO NO CHANGE
S-12D: FROM ALL GATES CLOSED TO 2 GATES @ 0.4' "

As excerpted from recent email sent among agency reps to coordinate gate operations

Actually, I am an engineer and I am having trouble understanding it in complete entirety -- let alone all its technical jargon -- even after multiple reads.  It's that packed with information.

That’s when I reach for a hydrograph to get a better view.

Graphs can say a lot with very few words

A few photos doesn’t hurt either!

Top: S-12D Tailwater, looking east
Bottom: S-12D looking east at S-333 in distance

Bottom line:

The S-12D is open for the first time all year ...
And, wow, nobody said water management would be easy (sigh.)

Cypress a far as the eye can see

This photo has me thinking the other way.

Can you see the fallen trees floating in the marsh?

Monsters of the midway

Halfway between Miami and Naples ...

are groves of giant cypress that scrape top of the sky.

I'll let you be the judge

Was the Big in Big Cypress Swamp
named for the individual size or vast number of trees?

If it were the latter,
Wouldn't they have called it
Many Cypress Swamp instead?

Gators get sheetflow moving!

Sheetflow was moving at a rate of 2 inches per second here.

That's a gator trail, by the way.

Quick as sheetflow

Water in the pines means that sheetflow has reached its fullest extent:

Both in geographic breadth and slow but steady flow.



But how slow is it, really?

Spinning in a vortex it looks pretty fast!

One tough hombre!

On guard at Islamorada

"Watch where you step!"

While I’m not the toughest guy around …

Nobody likes to slice their toe open on a shell.

Pruned feet are easily cut on a sharp shell

Or at least I think that’s what it was.

I was in three feet of water at the time, and – as is typically the case – horsing around when, next thing I knew, I was wincing in pain and hobbling to shore, flopping down on the wet sand, trying to get a good look.


My verdict?

It was deep, but clean …
Except for the shard I still found in it a day later.

Can you see the three shell flecks in my big toe?

But two days later it was still weeping and with a long three week summer holiday out of the country planned, wisdom prevailed and I was advised to have a doctor have a see before we boarded the plane.

Her verdict?

Three more pieces still there …
But too small to get out.


All I can hope is that extra calcium is good for my bones!

Leaving the pines

It's over ankle deep in the marl ...
Can you see my path?

Walk in the patchy pines

Can you hear the thunder?

Pine island

Swamp rises into pines

Bush on fire meets water-logged pine

Can a plant be on fire,
but not consumed by the flames ...

Let alone be drowned out by the water?

Fire and water co-exist in the swamp

Usually fire bush requires dry ground.

The give-away, if you look in the photos lower right, is that the plant is growing on the berm of an elevated road that traverses across one of the swamp’s deepest spots.



As for the original question,
The native slash pine sort of fits the bill:

Its bark is naturally fire proof.

No better example is the slash pine ...
wildfire charred trunk and wetted roots

Then come summer as the swamp crests ...

It has to wait out the invasion of shallow water
and find a way somehow to survive.

Post Fay

Tamiami Canal near Monroe Station, September 2008

Tropical curve balls

Here's a comprehensive guide to every hurricane that's ever struck Florida.

Just click on the dots to reach each storms history.

Alma (Jun 1966) was the earliest ...
Kate (Nov1985) among the latest.

The big news is how few have struck recently.

Any initial relief of Irene turning north (and away from the Florida peninsula,) was swept away by the byline that it was only first Atlantic-spawned hurricane of the year.

That means more are on the way.


As shown on the graph:

September and October account for half of Florida’s hurricanes.

Typical storm tracks

Irene could continue skirting east and miss the US coastline altogether.

Click here to see an animated map of how Irene’s NOAA-forecasted storm track has changed over the past week. If the eastern trend continues, it would put Florida and there rest of the Gulf and Atlantic Coast states high on the list of being long overdue.


Last hurricane to strike Florida was October 2005 when Category 3 strength Wilma made landfall in at Cape Romano and the last to strike the United States was September 2008 when Category 4 strength Ike made landfall near Galveston Texas.

Still plenty of chances to get more rain!

Fall is make or break for the south Florida's terrestrial wet season.

As shown in the graph above, the meteorologic wet season fizzles to an end by mid October and by the end of November activity in the tropics dwindles, too ...

Except in the case of 2005 when it couldn't seem to stop.

Storm-churned gulf

August 2008

"High seas ahead!"

I can't say if we'll get any rain from Irene,

But from the looks of this map we should be in for some waves.

Irene may not bring much rain or wind, but we could see some surf.

However, not being an oceanographer, I cannot speak precisely as to what SWAN Significant Wave Height means. According to Wikipedia it is defined as “the average wave height (form trough to crest) of the one-third largest waves.”


If I'm reading the legend correctly ....

That's some pretty high seas!

Irene curves east

Click on image to go to National Hurricane Center

Four gulls at beach

There was something about those four gulls in the distance, flapping their wings, flying overhead (and then like that they were gone,) that compelled me to take this photo before they were completely vanished out of view.

And, oh yeah ...

Can you see the four gulls in the distance?

The cloud was pretty impressive, too!

Real eagle nest

Talk about being "high and dry" in the pines!

Eagle-shaped cloud

The summer rains have kicked in.

Afternoon storms have been strong and steady (and starting early in the day).

Can you see the giant eagle-shaped cloud?

This one looks like it’s trying to touch down.

That’s Loop Road by the way.

Beach shadow

I don't feel like a shark.

Conversation with a shark

Two tourists honeymooning from Switzerland asked in relief:

“Should we worry about sharks?”


I promptly responded “no.

"However," I added (somewhat to their dismay), "there are sharks in the water as we speak." We were in the gulf about fifty feet from shore and four feet deep. We don’t have Great White Sharks like they do in Australia or recently of Chatham, Massachusetts in Cape Cod nor do sharks in general feed during the middle of the day.

“Most attacks occur in dusk and dawn when they are on the prowl.”

Don't worry about these cownose ray you can see ...

Then I added:

“You’re more likely to get stung by a bee or jelly fish or step in a shell.” We’ve yet to be stung by any jelly fish this summer, but we’ve already stepped on a couple bees which, despite appearing semi-drowned, still have enough wherewithal to prick the soft underside of your foot with a really good “ouch!”


That's when I caught myself:

I have to speak clearly and deliberately and without any slang if I want them to understand what I'm saying. With that in mind, I tried to explain that a jelly fish was an American term for sea nettle and that if by chance they were to get stung, the best cure is to pour vinegar over it to sooth the burn.”


At this point I thought I was making perfect sense …

Only I wasn’t.

“We enjoy eating fish instead of meat, too. It’s much healthier” he responded, then proceeded to translate what he was saying, in German, to his wife – probably something to the effect: “Honey, he says we should season our fish with vinegar.” My wife cleared up the matter to some degree by swimming in and explaining what the German word for sea nettle, but at that point it may have been too late.

... It's the unseen underwater swimmer you have to beware of.

The truth is that the conversation was cursed from the start –

You see, I had unwittingly bumped in to the tourist’s leg while swimming underway for an extended length of time – I can hold my breath for well over a minute – as part of a game of freeze tag with my sons.


Surfacing I saw his horror turn to relief.

He was just thankful I wasn't a shark!

Everglades bound

This airboat, and two others, were on their way
out to Water Conservation Area 3A
a couple Saturdays ago ...

As seen on the eastern edge of Naples, Florida.

Building a better buggy

Any way you slice it …

Slogging through the swamp is a slow go.

Rule number one is to check the weather.

That’s why to get from Point A to Point B humans rely on machines instead. It gets complicated in the swamp because at almost every spot is neither purely land nor one hundred percent water …

But rather a combination of the two.


Traditional trucks and boats simply don't work.

In their place are swamp buggies and air boats. Swamp buggies have over-sized tires, heavy-duty construction and high-torque engines that provide adequate traction across mudded and flooded areas. Airboats are smooth, flat-bottomed boats that operate in extremely shallow water by means of a large propeller that is fixed and caged on the back of the boat. Typically, the propeller and engine that drive it were originally co-opted from airplanes, thus giving them their name.

And oh yeah – they fly, too.

Rule number two is to be prepared.

As for the buggies, they are a slow go.

It can take the better part of all day to reach a backcountry camp, and that’s assuming everything goes as planned. Buggy operators have expert knowledge of the half-land-half-water and equal acumen of their custom-built machines which – over a lifetime – depend on a constant craftsmanship and care (not to mention a pretty deep pocket of change) to keep them up and running and reliable.

Rule number three and four is to avoid that cloud.

Nobody likes to break down in the middle of nowhere ... 

Especially with a storm bearing down.  Not that they wouldn’t know what to do and how to fix it if they did.

Slogging's one thing ...

Try standing in water over a half year straight!

"Swamp escalator going down!"

Slash pine flatwoods

My socks might have stayed dry here ...

Marl prairie

... if they weren't already wet from slogging here ...

Cypress dome

 ... and here ...

Pond apple forest

... I moved my wallet to my shirt pocket before entering here.

As seen on the same afternoon, last September, five miles apart.

High and wet

Water rises into the pinelands!

Tropical pines?

The Big Cypress water line has risen into the pinelands!

That’s the first time we’ve seen that since September of 2010.

A week of steady rains pushed the water line up into the pines

Wet seasons are defined by not just the height that swamp water peaks in early fall, but also by how long water stays at that elevated state.

The more technical term for the duration of flooding is hydroperiod.


Hydroperiod is the period of time, as measured in months, that the floor of the various habitat types – pinelands, marl prairie, cypress domes, and pond apple forests – hold water for any given year. Pinelands, and in particular the palmetto-bottomed mesic pines, form the uppermost rung of the swamp habitat ladder. When they become shallowly saturated, that means that sheetflow has spread to its full extent across the swamp and is flowing at full force.

Last year the mesic pines (red) stayed high and dry

The graph above shows annual hydroperiod in the pines over the years.

Like clockwork we can count on the water line rising into the hydric pines at some point of each summer and fall, but it isn’t until waters rise into the higher mesic pine – and stays there for multiple months – that we get our truly high-order fall floods. Examples of recent high flood years include the flood of record 1994-1995, 1999, 2005 and 2008.

How much data can you look at all at once?
Here's the full 20-year record all in one chart!

Last year was a low-order flood year in comparison.

The mesic pines stayed high and dry thanks in part to a lack of tropical rains. As you can see from the historic chart above, some of our deepest and longest stretches of pine-level flooding started or were prolonged by a visit from the tropics.

The boardwalk is alive!

In more ways than one ...

Woodstork wonderland waits

The Big Cypress has water up in the pines …

Compare that to Corkscrew Swamp, not too far as the woodstork flies, where waters have yet to fully rebound out of the long and deep spring drought.

The dotted line is the twenty-year median.
As you can see, current stage is two feet below.

By my calculations,

Corkscrew is a good two feet lower than where it normally is (and probably should be) this late in the summer which, if you look at “last year” on the hydrograph, is exactly where it was in August of 2010:

Up in the pines, pond apple a good two feet deep.



My only caveat is that I am not collecting this data for myself: I call in to the front desk of Audubon’s Visitor Center who maintains a daily log of staff gage readings.

So who knows?

Maybe the gage got accidently moved.

Corkscrew boardwalk as seen earlier in June

Unlikely, but that makes me think:

I should take a trip to the boardwalk to double check.

Swamp buggy below!

As seen driving north on Monument Trail
July 25, 2011

Three strikes for Suwannee

The Suwannee is a Florida divide:

To the south is peninsular, everything north is continental.

Suwannee missed out on its normal spring flows

Actually, it’s a blend of the two:

Frontal storms on the continent bring it to its annual peak each spring, but usually its tailwater reaches it can count on a second wind of water in the form of pensinsular-fueled sea-breeze storms to keep it flowing at a good clip all summer long.


This year, neither happened enough.

As a result, the Suwannee is having a record low year.

Comparison of the Suwannee to the Caloosahatchee (S-79)

Those two meteorological misses notwithstanding,

A rise in groundwater pumping didn’t help.


Here’s an article that explains more.