Tracer studies of sheet flow in the Florida Everglades

Information on sheet flow patterns in the marsh ridge and slough habitat of the Florida Everglades is scarce, primarily because of difficulty in taking measurements across large enough spatial scales in such a heterogeneous environment. As part of the Everglades Tracer Release Experiment (EverTREx), two SF6 tracer releases were conducted to measure sheet flow in relatively intact ridge and slough habitats. The first was a pilot experiment that allowed the analytical equipment to be tested in the Everglades, and yielded some preliminary, coarse‐scale measurements of advection and dispersion in multiple sloughs. In the second experiment, higher‐resolution measurements of tracer distributions in a single slough showed that the mean advection ranged from 0.08 to 0.15 cm s−1, while longitudinal dispersion ranged from 3.7 × 102 to 2.6 × 103 cm2 s−1.