Improving Coastal Flood Forecasting at Everglades National Park

With the restoration of the historic Guy Bradley Visitor Center and the construction of the Flamingo Lodge, the Flamingo area within Everglades National Park has seen an increase in visitors and inhabitants for the first time since damage by Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma in 2005. With the increased traffic and new seasonal residents working to serve visitors, the need for better coastal flood forecasting arose.

Several non-tropical low pressure systems during the fall and winter of 2023-24 flooded some of the low-lying coastal campgrounds utilized by new seasonal residents employed by the hospitality industry in the park. These impacts and the community safety needs led to the formation of this collaborative effort between the National Park Service (NPS) South Florida National Resources Center (SFNRC) and the National Weather Service forecast office in Miami. This effort aims to improve partner and public access to available observational data, map out impacts in the vulnerable Flamingo and Everglades City areas, and provide a roadmap for probabilistic non-tropical coastal flood forecasts and decision support services to the NPS, park visitors, and underserved communities along the southern tip of Florida.

This presentation will include a brief history and human geography of the Flamingo area and Everglades National Park, techniques used to provide available data and forecast information, some lessons learned from this project, and some of the improvements that are planned in the future.