Wet season ends strong!

The wet season officially ended in mid October.

Rainy October picks up slack for sub par June:

On the yearly chart, the wet season months
are shown as alternating shades of blue.

The only problem?

October was just getting started.


Not that it's been 31 days of continuous rain.

Unlike the core summer months of June, July, August and Summer during which south Florida gets a little bit of rain virtually every day, the regular pattern of sea-breeze fed afternoon showers dwindles and dies in mid October. As bountiful a rainfall month as October was, it essentially all fell in just three events.  Or in other words, they were three big storms!

Bare branched cypress trees
are a sure sign of fall.

The result:

Our rainy October made up for a dry June and pushed this year's wet season rain totals right are around 45 inches.  That's about average as a total.  However ...


There's something to be said for ending strong!

Happy "Hydrologic" Halloween!

Not your scariest
Jack-O-Lantern.

Swamps get scared, too!

Are the swamps spooky?

To the uninitiated, “yes."

All Ye Who Enter:
Beware!

And who could blame them, they are wooded, dark, and watery.

Alligators lurk, and panthers too – but those worries are misguided:


The animal you really have to watch out for are water moccasins.

Not that they chase you – they won’t!

Nor do they spook – they don’t!

Can you see the spider?

If not, you'll feel it with your face
when you walk into it.

Rather, it’s because they don’t spook when they hear you that causes the real fright.  If you walk without caution in their path, you could be surprised by a strike when you least expect it.

And yes, that could bite.

There are giant spiders too!

But even worse is a trunk-to-trunk spanning web on your face (and in your hands as you try to remove it after the fact),


Is a spider there too, in my hair or crawling down my neck?

It rarely the case, but the thought certainly spooks!

Knee deep pond apple
(still) in October!

Hollywood-inspired legends of a Swamp Thing and local lore of a Skunk Ape may have you fearing knee-deep cypress forests alone at night the same way Jaws kept you in the knee-deep shallows of breaking saltwater waves in a crowd at the beach with the sun at its peak.

The truth is that humans evolved to fear the swamps.

They are virtually uninhabitable by modern day standards, and efforts to inhabit them quite literally ruin whatever swamp was once there by way of digging, draining, filling, cutting, and building;

The cypress are lovely,
dark and deep ...

Don't get lost!

Not to mention the real Frankensteins of the quagmire – Maleleuca trees, Brazilian Pepper, Old World Climbing Fern, pythons, plus every other invader ...

On the rapidly-spreading list of non-native invasives!

I’m here to tell you it’s not we who should fear the swamps.

They are a misunderstood beauty in need of love instead.


The truth in actuality is quite the opposite:

It’s the swamps that should fear us!

In the right light:
Cypress aren't
so spooky afterall!

So tread lightly in a swamp near you, and trust in me whenever you do – by sun or night or nearing twilight – its liquid realm is a beautiful sight, from top to bottom and start to end, it’s silence is the comfort of your oldest friend.

Happy Halloween!

Pumpkin seed recipe

Recipe:
Dry pumpkins seeds for one day
add thin coat of olive oil and a dash of salt
Bake at 200 degrees for about 15 minutes
until lightly browned then eat

Watch your step!

Sometimes colors are a dead giveaway ...

As in don't eat them or you could die!

These creatures were crawling
in mass across the leaf litter
of a moist New England fall

Creatures colored phosphorescent orange
are more than likely toxic to the touch.

This mushroom had
the exact same shade.

And I definitely won’t eat
mushrooms of a similar shade …

For fear that they are poisonous.

As you can see
they weren't very big:

Can you see the two salamanders and one mushroom?

Except for pumpkins …

Orange is perfectly fine.

Nearby pumpkin patch

Especially the seeds!

Baking recipe will be posted tomorrow at 2 pm.

Tentacle tree

Pond apple tree
on the loose!

King of the creepy cypress

Gulp!

Took a Wrong Turn and Kept Going

Land of the Living Zombie Trees

Can You See the Ghost?

What lurks beneath ...

A hole in the benthic mat
of periphyton reveals an
unidentified creature's home.

Haunted hike!

Some trails are better walked in broad daylight.

Day: Strangler fig wrapped around a cypress.

Night: Hand of a giant ghoul squeezing an unsuspecting hiker.

Day: As scary as this tree is in broad daylight I don’t even want to think about what it looks like at night.

Night: See Day.

Day: Spiderwebs inconspicuously placed along the side of the trail.

Night: Giant banana spiders spin webs face high across middle of boardwalk.

Day: Do you see the shadows of giant cypress in the photo? They're the Ghost Trees of the Fakahatchee Past which, clear cut and logged in the 1940s, reappear at the marsh every Halloween for a swamp reunion. Apparently some get there early thus explaining the shadows.

Night:

How would I know?
I high tailed it out of there fast ...
(While it was still light!)

Tall but friendly

One less thing to fear in swamps:

Pond apples don't fall
from "tall cypress" heights!

Wet season misnomer?

Technically speaking, the wet season is over.

Pond apple start
the dry season
floating high.

But in terms of rainfall on the horizon and sheetflow on the ground ...

We still have a lot of wet months to go.


You see ...

Wet season is a meteorological – not a landscape – term.

October rain totals could be boosted
by frontal and tropical rains
due this weekend.

By official meteorological standards, i.e., dew point consistently dropping below 70° F, the wet season was pronounced over by the National Weather Service in Miami on October 19th. (Read official bulletin.) That temperature is the tipping point below which regular afternoon thunderstorms no longer regularly appear. It was a shorter than normal wet season: It lasted only 133 days, compared to the normal 153, but that was because it got off to an unusually late start on June 9 …

Plus, it had to lift itself out of a deep and prolonged spring drought.



On the other end of the spectrum,

Just because the wet season is over doesn’t mean our flood-season boosting rains are done.

October rainfall is hit or miss:
This year has been a hit!

An active tropics and healthy clip of continental fronts have conspired to boost October rain totals to the equivalent of a core wet season month …

Plus, the weekend forecast is calling an exclamation point at the end.

This pond apple forests will stay
flooded well into winter.

The result?

Pond apples will be floating into the dry season for weeks to come!


BTW: Dry season is a meteorological term, too.

Sixty-two year tradition

Historical signs are
always well worth the read:

As seen at Collier County Museum

Rain on swamp buggy parade?

Continental-style holidays and seasonal cues …

Don’t always make sense on the south peninsula.




But come October, south Floridians of all walks of life are ready to celebrate:

The rainy season is declared officially over but the water is still high, hot and humid weather starts to subside, mosquitoes suddenly disappear, the first official cold front arrives, stone crab season opens, hunting season begins and airboat and swamp buggy enthusiasts start to swing into full gear.


That’s where the Swamp Buggy Parade comes in:

It’s the community’s long-standing tradition of welcoming the start of the dry season and all its good tidings. The only caveat is that this year it looks as if Hurricane Rina may rain on our parade.

The 62nd Annual Swamp Buggy Parade
is being held this Saturday in Naples
October 29th, 10 am - noon.

But not to worry:

We are used to getting wet in the swamp!

Over the weir

Henderson Creek is flowing
after the recent big storm
October 21, 2011

Official cold front finally arrives!

Mark you books:

It’s official!

First official cold front arrives:

But is it still warm enough
to swim in the Gulf?

Naples received its first official cold front of peninsular fall.

And perfectly times for the weekend no less.


We had a slug of cool and dry air descend down from the continent to start the month, but it wasn’t cool enough – at least by text book definitions. By text book I’m talking Morton D. Winsberg’s Florida Weather. For comparative purposes, he defines the arrival of the first cold front form various metropolises across the state as two consecutive nights below 60° F standard.

The weekend rewarded us
with our our coldest consecutive
nights since March.

Can you see where that happened on the graph above?

Trust me, it felt cooler than it graphs up.


To celebrate I went swimming in the gulf.

Now that was cold!

Muhly grass

Can you see the Muhlenbergia?
(Photo taken at 4 pm facing northeast)

"Have to be there" plant

I’m not much of a wildlife photographer,

But I am pretty good at photographing plants.

Muhly grass is unremarkable
when looked at facing
away from the sun.

I attribute that to the fact that they stay still …

And don’t scare away when I approach them.


Why is it then I have such a touch time with muhly grass?

For one, it never stays still. It twists, turns, flutters and bends at the slightest of wind. And whole fields of it. And it isn’t until the sun is sinking down at an angle and you are staring straight at it that it lights up with a purple phosphorescence that catches the eye. But if you blink its gone: it’s season is short … just a few weeks in fall.

But turn around
and the whole prairie
lights up!

(This photograph not withstanding.)

As much as I’d like to take a good photo:

This is a plant that defies my grasp.

The other side of the sand dollar

Small hairs called cilia
help the sand dollar move
across the sandy floor of the gulf

June 2011

Sand dollar with the starfish tattoo

You see a lot of tattoos at the beach these days.

Even the sand dollars have them!

Can you see the starfish tattoo?

But what really caught my eye …

Was the giant cloud rising up behind.


Word from the National Weather Service in Miami is that south Florida’s meteorological wet season is officially over as of October 19th. (Read official bulletin.)  It was a short one, spanning only 133 days compared to the long-term normal of 153 due to its late June 9th startup.

The good news is that it ended strong with a stormy October.

Actual starfish

That could prove pivotal with a drier than normal winter and spring ahead, but that’s probably thinking way too far in the future:

Last word from the weather bureau is that October may not be done!

Yeti-sized footprint!

For anyone who needed
any more proof:

Unfortunately the tide washed it away
before I could get a plaster mold.

Holy grail bird

Has anyone seen an ivory-billed woodpecker recently?

The reason I say "recently" is because the last confirmed sighting was in 1944.

If the Yeti exists,
who's to say the Lord God Bird
isn't out there, too.

Back in 2005 there was a rash of new sightings ...

But as far as I know none of those were ever confirmed.


Now I'm reading an article in the Economist that declares them re-extinct.

Some ornithologists regard the bird as the Holy Grail.


Come to think of it they never found that either.

Upstream at S-65D

Here's how it looked a little further upstream,
courtesy of an onsite engineer.

Video of Kissimmee River

How do you measure flow ...

in such a turbulent unruly mess?




This video was taken by an on-site engineer.

I'm assuming they use rating curves.

Deep-water dwarves

Post Fay
August 2008

How many billions of billions?

Question:

How many billions of gallons per second of water are discharging into Lake Okeechobee because of the recent deluge on the Kissimmee River?

Answer: Wrong question!

Can you see how this year was tracking close
to the drought year of 2007 ...

Then came the October rains!

The first step in hydrology is getting the units right.

Numbers don’t mean anything unless we can put them within a framework that we can compare them to something we know.


The graph above shows the rate of water flow in the Kissimmee River for this year (to date) and previous years of note relative to the U.S. Geological Survey standard – cubic feet per second -- but goes the additional step of adding on the more layman-assessable Empire State Buildings per day, Fenway Parks (as filled up to the 37.5 ft tall Green Monster), and Olympic-sized swimming pools per second units.

So many billions of gallons or thousands of cubic feet will fool you every time because those numbers are hard to visualize whereas converting it relative to a two-acre baseball field or a 1,250 ft tall skyscraper immediately paints a clearer hydrologic view.

15,000 cubic feet per second equals
12 Empire State Buildings per day

Then comes the eureka moment:

“Wow, that is a lot of water!”

Locked lock

Navigational lock at Kissimmee's S-65E
Can you see the stop light?

Kissimmee rises again!

How high is the Kissimmee River?

Answer: High enough to touch the ceiling.

The Kissimmee River has discharged
a little over a half million acre feet
into Lake O this year to date.

That should increase in the weeks ahead.

Of course I mean “ceiling” in the statistical sense.

The above graph shows the current flow rate of the Kissimmee River relative to its 25-year historical stats. The dotted white line in the middle is the 25-year median, the dark green band colors in the area between 25th to 75th percentile, i.e. normal conditions, and extreme flow events, both high and low, are shown by the light green color coding.


The current year is shown as the blue line.

As you can see, it’s on its way to charting new high-water territory on the historic hydrograph.

This calendar highlights
the Kissimmee River's variation in flow
over the past few decades.

Not that we haven’t had some chart toppers in the past.

The most recent one before this was Fay in 2008 and a three-year consecutive streak summers of a swollen waters in 2003, 2004 and 2005. And don’t forget the spring El Niños. South Florida’s waters usually ebb in spring … unless there’s an El Niño, as happened in 2010 to a degree. But it was 1983 and 1998 that were the big ones.


Then there are times when the Kissimmee falls flat.

Can you see the extended no flow spells in 1981, 2001 and 2007?

Lock at S-65E

Locks on the Kissimmee River
are closed for safety reasons
until flood waters recede.

Photo is from Fall 2008

Face to a structure

I know a structure when I see one …

Even if it isn’t labeled with a name.

S-65E in October 2011

Click here
to read SFWMD's bulletin
on water management actions
underway on the Kissimee

The photo above is the S-65E structure.

It’s the Kissimmee River’s last stop before it heads down into Lake Okeechobee. As you can see, it’s gushing at full capacity due to a heavy deluge earlier in October.


And there is more rain on the way!

S-65E during Fall 2008

When I was there back a few falls ago,

The scene was altogether more placid. The dam doors were closed and the lock was open for business, although while I was there no boats came through.

S-65E lock (right) and dam (left)
looking upstream

I almost gave up trying to find the structure. I had to park at a locked gate and walk the final mile. But like a person never forgets a face ...

A hydrologist never forgets a structure.