Destruction by the Numbers continued…
This blog post is a follow-up to my previous post: https://wp.me/p3UayJ-9Vm, entitled “Top 25 Discharge Years” to the St Lucie and Caloosahatchee . Here I wrote that the SFWMD’s DBHydro systems’ discharge dates were not the same for the St Lucie and Caloosahatchee estuaries and speculated on why. To review, the St Lucie’s dates available on DBHydro are 1953-2019, whereas the Caloosahatchee’s is 1967-2019. Thirteen years are “missing.”
Of course my brother Todd, was able to locate and give insight into those missing numbers explaining that comparisons could be found in another system, the USGS system, that actually shares information about the entire planet.
Todd has created the above charts using the USGS data for the Caloosahatchee and the DBHydro data for the St Lucie, and we can now see the 1959/1960 discharge comparison of the St Lucie and Caloosahatchee for 1959 and 1960 in the above charts and excerpts below. Cool!
Delving into all this is a lot of work, and sometimes imperfect, but isn’t it great that the internet allows both the state and federal government to put all this raw data out there for anyone to analyze? Although it takes time and expertise, at the local level it is really our responsibility to individually, through non-profits, and as local governments, tap into this available data and present it in a fashion that everyone can understand, and perhaps inspire!
So now, the lost numbers of the Caloosahatchee are found revealing that the St Lucie River has the highest discharge number on record – 1960- at 3,093,488 acre feet!
For more information, go to http://eyeonlakeo.com/
USGS web-site: https://www.usgs.gov
DBHydro Portal, ~notice one can request training: http://xportal.sfwmd.gov/dbhydroplsql/show_dbkey_info.main_menu
DBHydro, SFWMD:https://www.sfwmd.gov/science-data/dbhydro
Those 59/60 era numbers are ‘interesting’…normally the Caloosahatchee gets twice the water versus the St. Lucie….not the other way around…???
Thanks again for more data to help us address our water crisis on the East Coast & West Coast!
I’m astonished at the high discharge levels in decades past when our water quality was MUCH better than today! It somewhat reinforces the fact that the primary problem we face is the elimination of the nutrients coming into Lake O. Agricultural buffer zones would partially address the nutrient runoff onto the Kissimmee River and Lake O. Deep Well Injection could address both volume of water and nutrients. Establishing water quality standards and explicit enforcement mechanisms would also greatly help reduce nutrient runoff.