Hydrologic Monitoring Network in Central and South Florida

The South Florida Water Management District (District) is responsible for managing water resources in 16-counties over a 46,439-square kilometer (17,930 square-mile) area. The area extends from Orlando to Key West and from the Gulf Coast to the Atlantic Ocean and contains the country's second largest lake — Lake Okeechobee and the world famous Everglades wetlands. The District operates approximately 3,000 kilometers (~1,800 miles) of canals, and over 400 water control structures. Acquisition of hydrologic and hydraulic data is a critical and key component of the District's mission. The District is responsible for the collection, validation, and archival of hydrologic data for real-time water management as well as for data analysis that results in historical hydrologic records that are used to evaluate and assess the status of the water resources systems. Data collection is accomplished via the District's hydrologic monitoring network, which has evolved over the years but were not specifically designed or optimized. The hydrologic monitoring network is divided into five parts: rainfall, meteorological, surface water stage, surface water flow, and groundwater. The network is spatially distributed over the geographic areas of the District with sensors that record data specifically based on a time variant, i.e., meteorological, rainfall, stage, flow, and groundwater data. Description of each network presents the history and evolution of the network; number and location of instruments; frequency of data collection; and time interval of the available data. It provides status and inventory of the network as of December 31, 2005. Hydrologic data management includes processing the data collected, summarizing, deriving and analyzing, storing, and publishing. Processed data are archived into two different databases, namely, DCVP and DBHYDRO. Instantaneous (breakpoint) data are stored into the DCVP database, while daily summary and 15-minute interval data are published in the DBHYDRO database. End users can retrieve data from either of these two databases.