Water Budget for Lake Trafford, a Natural Subtropical Lake in South Florida: An Example of Enhanced Groundwater Influx in a Subtropical Lake Subsequent to Organic Sediment Dredging

A very detailed water budget analysis was conducted on Lake Trafford in South Florida. The inflow was dominated by surface water influx via five canals (61%), with groundwater influx constituting 12% and direct rainfall constituting 27%. Lake discharge was dominated by sheet flow (69%) and evapotranspiration (30.5%), with groundwater recharge of the hydraulically connected unconfined aquifer accounting for only 0.5%. The removal of 30 M tons (4.4 × 106 m3) of organic sediment impacted the groundwater influx, causing enhanced groundwater flow into the deeper parts of the lake and mixed flow along the banks, creating a rather unusual pattern. The large number of groundwater seepage meters used during this investigation led to a very reliable set of measurements with occasional failure of only a few meters. A distinctive relationship was found between the wet-season lake stage, heavy rainfall events, and pulses of exiting sheet flow from the lake. Estimation of the evapotranspiration loss using data collected from a weather station on the lake allowed the use of three different models, which, when averaged, produced results comparable to Lake Okeechobee (South Florida). A limitation of this investigation was the inability to directly measure sheet-flow discharges, which had to be estimated as a residual within the calculated water budget.