A New Plan for Managing Lake Okeechobee Water Shortages

Lake Okeechobee is considered the heart of the water resources system in south Florida. The period 2000–2001 represented one of the worst droughts on record that the Lake, its tributary basins and its service areas have experienced. During the 2000–2001 drought, the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD), in cooperation with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, managed water deliveries from the Lake for agricultural irrigation and urban consumptive use according to a previous developed water allocation scheme, known as Supply Side Management (SSM). The SSM methodology was developed, documented and applied during the previous droughts. However, due mainly to growth in the system and increased number of users, application of the SSM guidelines during the 2000–2001 proved to be difficult and cumbersome, requiring day-to-day modifications to the methodology and extensive consultation with water users. By the end of 2001, drought conditions no longer existed in the region and the SFWMD embarked on an investigation of several new methods to allocate Lake water to various users during periods of low Lake stages. The main purpose of this paper is to describe the previous SSM methodology and the evolution of new methods that have been proposed and examined during 2002-2006, to manage the Lake during water shortage conditions. The new selected method, known as the Lake Okeechobee Water Shortage Management (LOWSM) plan is described in detail, together with a comparison of its performance to the previous SSM methodology. The tool used to compare the performance of the two water allocation methods is the South Florida Water Management Model, a regional hydrologic simulation model, capable of continuously simulating south Florida's hydrology and the response of the system under different operational scenarios.