Two new University of Georgia weather stations are providing
Georgia the ammunition it needs to avert future water wars with
neighboring states.

The UGA weather stations are at Sneads Landing and Cummings
Access on Lake Seminole, on the Georgia-Florida line. They were
installed at the request of the U.S. Geological Survey, a federal
agency that works with states and cities on hydrological
studies.

Much Needed Water Data

The new stations are funded by the USGS and the Georgia
Geologic
Survey, a unit of the Environmental Protection Division of the
Georgia Department of Natural Resources. They’re part of a
cooperative
study to prepare near-real-time water budgets for the lake.

Florida and Alabama are suing Georgia over water issues
involving
the Apalachicola, Chattahoochee and Flint rivers, which feed Lake
Seminole. The court battles, commonly called the tri-state water
wars, are nearing an end. But the dispute has shown the need for
better data.

"The
information we can get from these weather stations would have
been very useful in these tri-state negotiations if we’d had it
in time," said Lynn
Torak,
a USGS hydrologist.

The UGA weather network is formally known as the Georgia
Automated Environmental Monitoring Network. It has more than
40 stations across the state. The UGA College of Agricultural
and Environmental Sciences runs the network.

Each weather station collects data on air temperature,
relative
humidity, solar radiation, wind speed, wind direction, soil
temperature,
rainfall and barometric pressure.

At the new Lake Seminole sites, the USGS is interested in
gathering
water-related data.

"We need to be able to get a handle on inflows and
outflows
to the lake," Torak said. "These include precipitation,
evaporation, groundwater inflows and outflows and surface-water
inflows and outflows."

Torak said the data will be important in the state’s study
of Lake Seminole’s effects on the region’s water resources.

How Much Water is There?

"Georgia needs to know if there has been a significant
change in the amount of water available in the region, both
surface
and groundwater, since the lake has been in place," he
said.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began building the
36,000-acre
lake in the early 1950s. It was completed in 1957.

"The lake project involved clear-cutting cypress trees,
of which a large number remain in the lake," Torak said.
"The lake was built for recreation, hydropower production
for the City of Chattahoochee, Fla., and for navigational
purposes."

The USGS needs to see, too, how lake water interacts with the
groundwater system.

"Georgia is interested in knowing if water is leaking
out of the lake, entering the Upper Floridan Aquifer and flowing
across the state line into Florida," Torak said.

"We now know that ground water levels are fairly constant
around the lake," he said. "Basically, what flows into
the lake from precipitation and rivers and creeks upstream flows
out down the Apalachicola River, minus lake evaporation and
leakage."

Study Completed by 2001

Torak said the study will be completed by 2001. But the state
plans to keep the water budget on line for quite a while.

"Georgia would like to develop some long-range plans for
the water in the Apalachicola/Chattahoochee/Flint river
basin,"
he said. "To do so, the lake has to be studied. You have
to first know how much water is available."

Georgia needs lake-water data to protect Floridians, too.
"The
state wants a real-time water budget to know on a weekly or even
daily basis what the flows are into and out of the lake,"
Torak said. "This ensures delivery of water to downstream
users in Florida."

Anyone can get weather data from the new stations and others
from the Georgia AEMN Web site (http://www.griffin.pea
chnet.edu/bae).
Current conditions are updated hourly. Other data and summaries
are updated daily at midnight.

The new weather stations will help Georgia by providing
valuable
water data. But UGA will benefit, too.

Expands UGA’s Weather
Network

"These new stations extend the weather network and
improve
our ability to cover the entire state," said Gerrit
Hoogenboom, coordinator of the UGA weather network and a CAES
associate professor of biological and agricultural
engineering.

"We can now collect data from the southwest corner of
Georgia," he said. "That’s an area we were unable to
reach before these stations were installed."

Hoogenboom would like to add more weather stations on
Georgia’s
borders to, in effect, further broaden the area the AEMN covers.