Creeks, plants and forecasters of the Florida Panhandle welcomed the weekend’s rain: a reprieve from one of the most widespread droughts in the state in over a decade.
The rain was gentle and soaking, not the violent, short-lived kind that washes away before sinking in. But it wasn’t enough to replenish low flows in the Floridan Aquifer.
Unlike surface waters, which swell hours or weeks after a good storm, aquifer levels depend on about two years’ worth of rain. One wet weekend can’t fully restore the Floridan Aquifer’s flow, especially as an ever-growing number of wells competes for its water.
Nine groundwater monitoring wells within the Suwannee River Water Management District reported critical levels in November, according to a report issued Tuesday.
Consistent, season-long rain could replenish low aquifer levels throughout North Florida. But, for now, the underground drought marches on, impacting plants, birds and springs.
Causes of the drought
“This drought's developed over the last three or more months where we had a really severe lack of rainfall,” said State Climatologist David Zierden, a senior research associate at Florida State University.
Scorching late summer days wrung moisture from the soil.
Hurricane Melissa brought a deadly mix of wind and rain to Jamaica but had the opposite effect on Florida as it skirted the peninsula.
“On the western periphery of these storms, you see large scale subsidence or sinking air, drier conditions and amplified high pressure,” Zierden said.
That trio of conditions suppresses rainfall.
“We've seen that time and time again,” Zierden said. From Hurricane Matthew in 2016 to Hurricanes Dorian and Humberto in 2019 : “all of these were followed by a period of drought or extremely dry weather and I think we saw that again this year.”
Colder than normal ocean temperatures along the equator could’ve dried things out, too, he said. La Niña conditions developed in the Pacific Ocean in September, pushing cool air north of the jet stream and blanketing Florida and the Northern Gulf Coast in warm, dry air.
“That just helped reinforce this warmer and drier regime we've been under for most of the last three months,” Zierden said.
These conditions and the droughts they create, he emphasized, are natural fluctuations of the region’s climate. Though human-caused climate change makes hot days hotter, increasing evaporation, “I don't think we can blame this episode directly on climate change,” Zierden said.
“We've dodged some bullets in the last 12 years or more,” he said in reference to drought. “It was almost overdue.”
Impacts to crops, trees and wildlife
Cotton farmers welcomed the dry conditions. While last fall’s hurricanes snapped plants’ stalks and turned pristine bolls to mush, this season’s drought kept their harvests clean.
Florida’s peanut farmers, meanwhile, would’ve preferred the drought to hold off a little longer.
In late September, peak harvest season, 90% of the Southeast’s peanut production area was abnormally dry with three quarters under some level of drought.
Farmers at the helm of mechanical diggers struggled to sink the machines’ metal tines into dry, rigid earth.
The sun acted like a kiln for South Georgia’s clay-filled soils, baking peanuts into the ground as farmers tried to coax them out. The heat stressed the legumes, making them more vulnerable to crop-killing pathogens including fungi.
Foresters, too, would’ve liked more rain.
“Fire season won't end until we have a named storm,” said Ludie Bond, public information officer and wildfire mitigation specialist with the Florida Forest Service.
“Some people are breathing a sigh of relief, understandable,” Bond said. “ But we didn't get the rain that we depend on.”
Dry, leafy layers of the forest floor act as kindling, turning a spark from a lightning strike or match into a potentially dangerous fire. The heavy, saturating rains of a tropical storm or hurricane penetrate deep into forest soils, reducing their likelihood of igniting.
Florida faces above normal potential for significant, uncontrolled fire from December to March according to the National Interagency Fire Center’s most recent quarterly report.
“Usually about this time of year we're starting to prep and get ready for the dormant prescribed burn season,” Bond said. But multiple agencies have deemed it too dry to burn.
Alachua County implemented a burn ban from mid-November until Dec. 10, its first since 2021. While the Florida Forest Service doesn’t have to abide by county-level bans, Bond said the drought has delayed its prescribed burn regime, too.
Last week, Bond and her team planned to burn circles around 500 trees in the Goethe State Forest that house threatened red-cockaded woodpeckers.
The birds outline their carefully crafted cavities with sticky pine sap to deter predators. Since the stuff is highly flammable, forest managers keep fire away from the woodpeckers’ trees by burning a ring of trees around them. Months later, when crews set larger swaths of the forest ablaze, the charred rings act as natural fences to keep flames away from the woodpeckers’ homes.
“We had planned on it, but we had to cancel it because it's too dry,” Bond said.
Strategies to save water
The Floridan Aquifer is a bank for one of the region’s most valuable currencies.
Come spring, farmers will draw millions of gallons of water from it to offset lengthening days and warming rays. But winter rains aren’t building up the bank’s water-supply account and springtime users will still want to make their withdrawals.
Still, only one of Florida’s five water management districts, groundwater’s brokers, has declared a water shortage.
The Southwest Florida Water Management District issued a phase I water shortage advisory at the start of December to encourage users to scale back. The advisory, which lasts until June, bans inefficient or impractical water use including: running a hose unattended, washing paved surfaces when sweeping is possible and failing to repair broken sprinklers.
The Suwannee River and St. Johns River Water Management Districts share authority over Alachua County. Both are watching groundwater levels closely.
“Current conditions mirror those that were experienced in 2016-2017, but we are still far from the drought conditions we saw in the Fall 2011 - Spring 2012,” wrote a spokesperson for the Suwannee River Water Management District.
Rainfall throughout the District in November averaged just over a tenth of an inch, the lowest on record since 1936.
In the St. Johns River Water Management District, which spans Duval to Indian River County, “we're paying close attention,” said Michael Daly, technical program manager in the District’s Bureau of Water Resource Information.
In the northern and western parts of the district, groundwater is “at the level where we get kind of concerned. Is the trend going to continue dry and going down, or is it going to start to recover?”
The District last declared a water shortage more than two decades ago. The last time it got close was 2017.
If winter and spring bring above-normal rainfall, “we might be okay,” Daly said. If rainfall levels are average or, as the National Weather Service forecasts, below average, “we might see some critical levels as early as February or March.”
Whether North Florida’s drought improves or worsens, Stacie Greco, water resources program manager with the Alachua County environmental protection department urges residents to be mindful of their water use.
More than half of a utility’s residential water supply ends up on lawns.
“The typical irrigation system uses a thousand gallons when you turn it on,” Greco said. “To put that into terms that are easy to understand, that's about the same amount of water as doing 37 loads of laundry or taking an eight hour shower.”
