HR: 0830h
AN: NG31A-0602    [PDF]
TI: Everglades Modeling
AU: * Stothoff, S A
EM: stothoff@bellsouth.net
AF: Southeast Environmental Research Center, Florida International University 11200 S.W. 8th Street, Miami, FL 33199 United States
AU: Mitchell-Bruker, S
EM: sherry_mitchell@nps.gov
AF: Everglades National Park, 950 N. Krome Avenue, Homestead, FL 33030 United States
AB: The Florida Everglades is a vast, low-relief, nearly horizontal, densely vegetated subtropical wetland with slow-moving water and only trace inputs of sediment and nutrients. The natural system is a classic example of a self-organizing system, with feedbacks between hydrology, vegetation, and soil evolution, but not all controls on landscape patterns are well understood. Engineered features (roads, canals, levees, etc.) have since the 1920s greatly modified the hydrologic regime, resulting in significant loss of peat and degraded patterning. We are developing a nested flow and transport model to try to understand dominant processes in landscape formation. Flow is described in 2D, vertically integrated over the surficial aquifer and surface water (using vegetative-drag models rather than Manning's equation). Transport is described in 3D, with sediment and (in the future) nutrient transport considered. High correlation between vegetative resistance and microtopography allows a parsimonious large-scale [O(1~km)] flow model based on a truncated normal distribution for microtopography that is partitioned by vegetation class. A more complex landscape-unit model describes both flow and transport at the large scale, with the potential of considering landscape evolution. The landscape-unit model considers typical landscape units as additional embedded continua within a slough continuum. The large-scale models can be used on their own, and also to provide boundary conditions for fine-scale [O(10~m)] simulations considering individual landscape features and the local effect of engineered systems.
DE: 1815 Erosion and sedimentation
DE: 1824 Geomorphology (1625)
DE: 1836 Hydrologic budget (1655)
DE: 1860 Runoff and streamflow
SC: Nonlinear Geophysics [NG]
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting