Griffiths, Peter G

15 items:

Frequency and initiation of debris flows in Grand Canyon, Arizona Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Sediment yield and runoff frequency of small drainage basins in the Mojave Desert, U.S.A. Sediment yield from small arid basins, particularly in the Mojave Desert, is largely unknown owing to the ephemeral nature of these fluvial systems and long recurrence interval of flow events. We examined 27 reservoirs in the northern and eastern Mojave Desert that trapped sediment from small (< 1 km2) drainage basins on alluvial fans over the past 100 yr, calculated annual sediment yield, and estimated the average recurrence interval (RI) of sediment-depositing flow events. These reservoirs formed where railbeds crossed and blocked channels, causing sediment to be trapped and stored upslope. Deposits are temporally constrained by the date of railway construction (1906–1910), the presence of 137Cs in the reservoir... Categories: Publication; Types: Citation; Tags: Cesium 137, Desert geomorphology, Runoff frequency, Sediment yield
Spatial distribution and frequency of precipitation during an extreme event: July 2006 mesoscale convective complexes and floods in southeastern Arizona Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Modeling Water-Surface Elevations and Virtual Shorelines for the Colorado River in Grand Canyon, Arizona Using widely-available software intended for modeling rivers, a new one-dimensional hydraulic model was developed for the Colorado River through Grand Canyon from Lees Ferry to Diamond Creek. Solving one-dimensional equations of energy and continuity, the model predicts stage for a known steady-state discharge at specific locations, or cross sections, along the river corridor. This model uses 2,680 cross sections built with high-resolution digital topography of ground locations away from the river flowing at a discharge of 227 m3/s; synthetic bathymetry was created for topography submerged below the 227 m3/s water surface. The synthetic bathymetry was created by adjusting the water depth at each cross section up... Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Holocene debris flows on the Colorado Plateau: The influence of clay mineralogy and chemistry Holocene debris flows do not occur uniformly on the Colorado Plateau province of North America. Debris flows occur in specific areas of the plateau, resulting in general from the combination of steep topography, intense convective precipitation, abundant poorly sorted material not stabilized by vegetation, and the exposure of certain fine-grained bedrock units in cliffs or in colluvium beneath those cliffs. In Grand and Cataract Canyons, fine-grained bedrock that produces debris flows contains primarily single-layer clays—notably illite and kaolinite—and has low multilayer clay content. This clay-mineral suite also occurs in the colluvium that produces debris flows as well as in debris-flow deposits, although unconsolidated... Categories: Publication; Types: Citation; Tags: Colorado Plateau, clay mineralogy, debris flow, geomorphology, major-cation chemistry, All tags...

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