Vertical leakage and vertically averaged vertical conductance for Karst Lakes in Florida

Abstract

In the karst lake district in peninsular Florida in the southeastern United States, as many as 70% of the lakes lack surface outlets, and groundwater outflow is an important part of the water budgets of these lakes. For 11 karst lakes in the Central Lake District, vertical leakage from the lakes to the upper Floridan aquifer averages 0.12 to 4.27 m yr−1. The vertically averaged vertical conductance Kv/b, a coefficient that represents the average of the vertical conductances of the hydrogeologic units between the bottom of a lake and the top of the upper Floridan aquifer, was determined to range from 0.0394 to 1.00 yr−1 for these lakes. For six of the lakes, various hydraulic parameters previously calculated by other investigators are shown to be equivalent to the Kv/b values calculated in this study. If Kv/b is determined for a lake, then vertical leakage can be estimated for other conditions of lake stage and hydraulic head in the upper Floridan aquifer, using Kv/b for the lake and Darcy's equation written for vertical flow. The methodology described in this paper for quantifying Kv/b, which requires only limited data (i.e., vertical leakage, lake stage, and hydraulic head in the upper Floridan aquifer), could be used to investigate the apparent association between relatively large Kv/b values and lake level instabilities at some lakes in the Central Lake District and similar hydrogeologic settings. This methodology for calculating vertical leakage is applicable to the Central Lake District in Florida and to other similar lake and groundwater systems.