SEMINAR: GEOTOPICS - Monday (4/05) 3.15PM - Dr. Amartya SAHA (FIU)

[Marco Bagnardi <mbagnardi@rsmas.miami.edu>]

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 P  r  e  s  e  n  t  s  

3:15 PM, Monday, April 5th, 2010
SLAB Seminar Room, S/A 103

Refreshments 3:00 PM

Dr. Amartya SAHA

Florida Coastal Ecosystems Long Term Ecological Research (FCE-LTER)
Southeastern Environmental Research Center
Florida International University

asaha@fiu.edu

 

"Development of a hydrological budget for Shark River Slough, 

Everglades National Park for the period 2002-2008"

Amartya Saha ¹, René Price ^1,2 & Vic Engel ³ 1: Southeastern Environmental Research Center, FIU, Miami, FL 2. Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, FIU, Miami, FL. 3. South Florida Natural Resources Center, Everglades National Park, FL

A monthly and annual water budget has been created for Shark River Slough (SRS) within the Everglades National Park (ENP) over 2002-2008. Inputs considered are surface water inflows via water delivery structures (S12s and S333) and precipitation, while outputs consist of evapotranspiration, discharge to the Gulf of Mexico (Lostman, Shark, Broad, Harney and North rivers) and seepage losses from the eastern part of the slough under levee L31. Using a mass balance approach, monthly change in volume of SRS (from water level changes) is equated to the sum of inputs, outputs and a residual term, that includes error in each of the inputs and outputs as well as net groundwater exchange. Seepage losses have been estimated from an algorithm that takes the groundwater head differential across the levee and regresses that with seepage estimates obtained by the model MODBRANCH. Evapotranspiration (ET) has been estimated using both vapor transport modeling and latent heat measurement based estimates. The former models are the FAO-PM model for calculating reference ET, the Shuttleworth PM model that also takes vegetation type into account and two simple net radiation-based models that was found by us to closely track ET values obtained by the Penman-Montieth models using meteorological data from the 4 eddy covariance towers located in ENP. Results for 2002-2008 indicate that precipitation is the largest input to the SRS, while ET is the largest output, with ET being equal to or greater than precipitation. A net groundwater discharge to freshwater flow is seen and this supports earlier hydrological and geochemical findings of coastal groundwater discharge in the mangrove zone. The small quantity of inflows relative to precipitation and ET highlights the necessity of gradually increasing surface water inflows to restore ecosystem processes in terrestrial, freshwater and marine portions of the ENP.

 

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Marco Bagnardi

mbagnardi@rsmas.miami.edu