view from castle

"Furniture-burning" freeze

Yes, Belgium is cold:

I’ve already noted that “the coldest winter I’ve ever spent (since I’ve moved to south Florida) was a summer in Belgium.”


Not that I minded.

Snowbirds flock to Florida for the winter, but come summer, full time residents migrate the other way, or try to – for as many weeks as can be allowed.



But what about a Belgium winter?

As a rule they are wet, cold, and cloudy … plus, count on more rain than snow.

But deep freezes periodically descend from the arctic, to “furniture burning” effect.


I don’t know that by experience, but rather “second hand:”

The story is that when American troops pushed through eastern Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge, General Dwight D. Eisenhower set up a temporary winter base camp inside this castle.


From a strategic standpoint it was an enviable spot:

High terrain, good views in all directions, and a steep valley to one side.

Had it only a few chords of dry wood it would have been perfect!



Plan “B” would have to suffice instead. Standing, after all, was better than freezing –

And furniture can be replaced.



Special thanks on this day to all our veterans.

Weir No. 1 video

Multi-gear cycle

How can we be at a record low …

But still be pretty high?


Blame it on an early end to the wet season (i.e., a stormless October) and a rainless early start to the dry season (November – mid May).

The result is that the swamp is at a two-decadelow for mid November.

Keep in mind that swamp stage is still high relative to what we’ll see later in the winter and spring.

That’s assuming we don’t have a “wet” dry season – as I’ve read we might in the newspapers. The same El Nino that quieted the Atlantic hurricane season with high-altitude sheer winds may send us a “colder and wetter” winter here in south Florida.

Or so the theory goes:

The last-gasp reemergence of the tropics with Ida gives me pause for thought.

Did something change?


Our last really big El Nino-soaked dry season was epic El Nino of 1998, and before that, 1994-1995, which importantly was the back end of a relatively weak (but multi-year) El Nino:

Such a prolonged condition is favorable to wet Florida winters.

Those years “freeze-framed” the swamps in a full saturation mode through most of the winter.

My best guess for this year is “slow motion” slide down into traditional dry season territory, as shown below.

Blues show surface water (the darker the deeper), the sand color is where it is dry.
What’s wet and dry (and how deep) is a function of the seasons and other cycles.

The water cycle is just "one wheel," but it has many gears!

Weir No. 1

First weir

Skies have been rainless for a month,


But the waters were still flowing ...


as of late October when I visited this structure.


This is Weir #1:

The final structure on the Golden Gate Canal (in Collier County). It feeds water into the original run of the Gordon River, and then out to sea ...

Or in this case, the gulf.

local grown

Very ripe on the vine

Florida is the land of oranges,

But you won’t find any in the stores now … at least not the natives.


That will be changing in the upcoming weeks now that weather has cooled.

In the meanwhile, you may have noticed the prolific presence of another fruit on the racks:

It’s apple season up north!


One fall long ago I visited my brother in the Hudson River valley.

I had just returned east after living a few years in the Sonoran Desert corner of the Great American Southwest studying (you guessed it) water.


The back story is that Arizona didn’t have any (water), or not much of it – the few drops they did have were more precious because of it.

Also conspicuously absent were “seasons.”

The natives always scoff indignantly. “Of course we have seasons!” they’d sternly rebut followed by a subtle litany explained in condescending overtones.


Regardless, I found myself routinely pausing in thought during my entire stay in Arizona trying to remember what month it was …

“Is it April or August?”

“Oh that’s right, how could I forget – it’s January!”


In any event, I arrived at my brothers doorstep after a five-hour drive from Cape Cod, not so much in a state of “time out of mind” as I was a “mind out of season.”

Opening his fridge, I was shocked to see apples packed everywhere – up on the egg racks, behind the butter, in every unused drawer.

I grabbed one instinctively and proceeded to wash it under the faucet.

“Is it alright if I eat an apple,” I asked.

“They’re pretty good,” a voice deadpanned from the other room, “unless you want to wait until spring for them to get really ripe on the vine!”


Confused, a bit embarrassed, but hungry – I ate that apple.

Thinking about it days later I broke out into riotous laughter (and for a few years running it became a standard joke between my brother and I):


Of course the apples were “alright to eat” – it was October, in Dutchess County, orchards everywhere:

“What part of fall didn’t I understand?”

Seen but not heard:
heat lightning

Back to the future

A Jetport almost destroyed the Big Cypress Swamp, but ended up saving it instead.

Before the preserve was a preserve it was just a remote patch of swampland that developers subdivided and people bought (from around the world) in hope that it lay in the "path of progress."


Then entered Miami-Dade County:

It bought 37-square miles of the swamps eastern corner in hopes of building a municipal airport to service both coasts.

(Miami’s coastal airport was running out of room.)

They got as far as a two mile runway before an environmental movement “took off” to stop it.



Everglades Nat’l Park also factored in:

It gets three-fifths of its upstream inflow of freshwater via Big Cypress flow ways.



But stopping the Jetport was always about saving the swamp (in the form of Big Cypress Nat’l Preserve and Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve, both established in 1974).

Or rather, stopping “progress” before it got started!



As for the Jetport?

The two mile runway and 37-mile tract are still there, both owned by Miami-Dade County, along with issues surrounding what to do with them. (article 1) (article 2) (article 3)



The "path to progress" sometimes runs in full circle:

In the swamp sometimes the slog never ends.

Drive home safely:

It's dark now early!

"Magnificent" six

It’s official:

This year’s wet season is history.

It started fast with record May rains,
and ended early with a rainless October.

In total, we ended with 40 inches,
within those 6 months.

That’s chimes in right around average,


But make no mistake:

There’s nothing “average” about south Florida’s wet season clouds.

It’s a “magnificent” six months by any meteorological standard.

S12A

Engineered fall

The dry season is here ... finally!

How do I know?


Some look to the skies for the absence of clouds. Others go by the feel of cooler (or less warm) temperatures. Still others look for the signs of dry ground.

While each has its merits, they are subjective and uncertain to a degree:

• The tropics stay open until November’s end,
• Sloughs and strands remain under water (even if the pines have gone dry),
• And cloudless skies can still torch with summer-style heat.

My hunt for the “case-closed-gate-shut” sign led me to the S12A.

It quite literally shuts (stopping the water) on November 1st of each year.


The S12A is the westernmost of the four famed water control structures that deliver inflows into the northern boundary of Everglades Nat’l Park.

(They are revamping another closer to Miami – by means of a one mile bridge – which will incrementally increase flows into the main channel of Shark River Slough over the coming years.)

As for now, the other three S12 structures are still open,

But they too will close as the dry season progresses in the months ahead.


It’s been a relatively small inflow year for the Park –

Around 350,000 acre feet of water has discharged through the four S12 structures this year to date. The annual average discharge over the past 10 years has been 650,000 acre feet. The big flow year of record was 2,300,000 acre feet in 1995. The most recent big flow year was 1,200,000 in 2005.

As a result, water depths in Shark River Slough fell about 8 inches below the normal early fall peak. Current stage is also about 8 inches below early November of last year, almost 2 feet below the late October peak of the record 1995 year, and a half foot higher than the drought summer of 2007.


The summer drought of 2007 was an interesting year.

The S12s delivered a measly 30,000 acre feet of water into the Park – which, in comparison, is less than the annual flow volume down the diminutive Turner River here in Big Cypress Nat’l Preserve. As a result, the glades stayed contained in the ridge and slough lowlands of the park all year.


That year, the question wasn’t so much when the dry season began,

But rather how the wet season never got started.

continent versus peninsula

Still waiting

Atlanta has a national reputation for being quite hot,

Thus its nickname – “Hot” Lanta.

But by south peninsula standards it becomes quite cool in non-summer months.


The metric I look at is the 60 degree line.

Here in Florida we use it – or rather, when average night-time low temperatures drop below it – to mark the beginning of fall.

Atlanta typically drops below that mark by mid September.

This year hotter weather lingered longer there, into the start of October.

But that’s splitting hairs:

A month later at the start of November, Atlantans are confronted with the brisk reality of sub-70 degree days and night-time lows dipping into the 40s.

That’s not only equivalent of our coldest of cold winter days in Naples,

It’s also looking way too far ahead:

Fall has yet to arrive by the 60 degree standard!

November is the final "official" month of hurricane season

Sentinel cypress

In the heart of New England, just off the center of its innermost rotary, is a giant oak that stands at the spot where the original bargain was brokered to begin what was to become – 4 centuries later – the quaint town of Concord, Massachusetts.

It’s not the exact tree, but supposedly it is the exact spot.

In the days prior to major landmarks and global positioning systems, you can imagine that giant trees were probably as good a mark on the map as any.


Does south Florida have similar tree?


The cypress strands and domes of Big Cypress Nat’l Preserve look ancient, and probably have been there for a few thousand years –

But the trees are “new.”

The old-growth giants that Ponce De Leon sailed by (but never saw) were logged decades ago in the 1940s.


Of course the Everglades are famously treeless,

But in actually they are conspicuous by their relative absence in the form of tiny tear-drop shaped archipelagos which dot the marsh expanse – called “tree islands” – and which prior to roads or canals were the high ground outposts on the navigable inland waters of the River of Grass.


Along the coast today you’ll find people packed in like sardines. That landscape – let alone finding a tree still standing – would be unrecognizable to the original settlers who first saw it.


That brings me to Lake Okeechobee.

Along its south shore there stands stalwart against time a sentinel cypress.

It would probably be just any other tree if it not been photographed in a now famous faded view which frames it in the foreground and a steam ship in the background floating on the lake in the waning days of when it waters still flowed free, levee-less, over its banks into the saw grass plain of the Everglades to the south.

Ten feet of land subsidence later, plus a thirty foot high levee (that runs for 143 miles), almost a century worth of years behind it, and now over looking a major water control structure:

That cypress still stands … alive!


I’ve never seen it, but if it does:

That’s both the same spot and the exact tree, south Florida style!

It's "lights out" for the summer weather machine,
November is here!