Scott A Wright (Former Employee)
Science and Products
Sediment transport, streamflow, and climate change: long-term resilience of the Bay-Delta
Sediment supply is important to the health of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and San Francisco Bay (Bay-Delta) ecosystem. Sediment eroded from upland source areas in the Sacramento and San Joaquin watersheds is transported through the rivers to the Bay-Delta where it is deposited in mudflats and tidal wetlands, which in turn helps protect against the effects of sea-level rise. Sediment...
Sediment Acoustics
The U.S. Geological Survey recognizes the need to provide sediment acoustic training and to develop standardized techniques and practices.
Mapping Sturgeon Spawning Habitat in the Lower San Joaquin River
The spawning of adult white sturgeon ( Acipenser transmontanus) in the lower San Joaquin River was documented recently by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) (Gruber and others, 2012; Jackson and Eenennaam, 2013). Streamflow on the San Joaquin River has been modified by State and Federal water project operations, and there are a variety of questions regarding the effects on fish...
Delta sediment measurements to support numerical modeling of turbidity
The purpose of the proposed work is to collect data that will support the development, calibration, and validation of numerical models of sediment transport and turbidity in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
Geomorphic Assessment and Restoration Alternatives Development for the Merced River in East Yosemite Valley, Yosemite National Park
The National Park Service (NPS) and USGS jointly will investigate impacts to the Merced River due to infrastructure and historic channel widening in east Yosemite Valley with a goal of constructing river management alternatives. Past management actions, such as gravel mining, channel riprap, and the construction of bridges that do not accommodate flood flows, have had long-lasting impacts to the...
Exploring: Reservoir Capacity And Sedimentation Of The Fena Valley Reservoir Guam
The Fena Valley Reservoir, located in southern Guam, is the primary source of water for the United States Naval Base Guam and nearby village residents. At full capacity, the reservoir surface area extends approximately 0.30 mi 2, and drains a watershed area of about 5.88 mi 2. After reservoir construction, periodic bathymetric surveys, coupled with sedimentation models, can be used to produce...
Surrogate Monitoring of Sediment Transport using Hydrophones along the San Joaquin River and Tributaries
Traditional methods for measuring coarse bedload sediment transport by discrete physical sampling tend to be labor intensive and expensive ( Gray and others, 2010). As such, bedload samples often are collected too infrequently to capture the temporal variability inherent in transport rates, which can vary significantly, sometimes by a factor of ten or more, over time periods of several minutes to...
San Antonio Reservoir Bathymetric Survey and Sedimentation Study
Over time, the flow of water into the San Antonio Reservoir has caused the build-up of sediment, decreasing storage capacity. Since water storage is a crucial issue in California, up-to-date information on the reservoir is needed. To accomplish this, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission approached the USGS California Water Science Center to conduct a bathymetric (depth) survey and other...
Monitoring the Impacts of the Rim Fire on Tuolumne River Water Quality
The Rim Fire has burned over 400 square miles of the Tuolumne River and Merced River watersheds in central California and is now the 3rd largest wildfire in state history. The burn area is largely on the Tuolumne between Hetch Hetchy Reservoir and Don Pedro Reservoir, both of which serve as critical sources of drinking water and irrigation water to San Francisco Bay area and Central Valley...
Implementing New Acoustic Monitoring Techniques in the Trinity River
Accurate river-sediment data is fundamental to planning and managing river restoration efforts on the Trinity River, and throughout the world’s waterways. The USGS has developed a “hydrophone” that enables scientists to listen to sediment particles as they move along the riverbed in order to inexpensively and reliably record near-continuous sediment-bedload-transport data. For this study...
The 'Digital Grain Size' Web and Mobile-Computing Application
This project team developed a Web-hosted application (that can also be used on mobile platforms) for automatic analysis of images of sediment for grain-size distribution, using the “Digital Grain Size” (DGS) algorithm of Buscombe (2013) (“DGS-Online,” 2015). This is a free, browser-based application for accurately estimating the grain-size distribution of sediment in digital images...
Colorado River milage system and ancillary attribute data for connecting to hydrodynamic model output in Glen Canyon, AZ
These data were compiled to support stranding risk modeling of young-of-year rainbow trout in Glen Canyon resulting from fluctuating flows from Glen Canyon Dam, called Trout Management Flows (TMFs). The objective of our study was to evaluate the stranding risk associated with different TMFs. We used the results of a 2-dimensional hydrodynamic model (Wright and others, 2024) as input to a...
Hydrodynamic model of the Colorado River, Glen Canyon Dam to Lees Ferry in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Arizona: tables of model results and accuracy assessment
These data were compiled to provide a resource for other researchers interested in water-surface elevations and flow velocity across a wide range of discharge in the study reach for the project. Objective(s) of our study were to construct a two-dimensional hydrodynamic model for the 15.8 mile tailwater reach of the Colorado River in Glen Canyon between Glen Canyon Dam and Lees Ferry...
Sediment grain-size data from the Klamath estuary, California
This data release supersedes version 1.0, published in November 2021 at https://doi.org/10.5066/P9CAZIHJ. Versioning details are documented in the accompanying Klamath_Grainsize_VersionHistory.txt file. This data release includes grain-size measurements of sediment samples collected from the substrate surface and uppermost 10 cm of sediment deposits in the Klamath estuary, northern...
Bathymetry, Stage-Area, and Stage-Volume Tables for the Calaveras Reservoir, California, 2019
Dataset contains reservoir bathymetry and shoreline topography up to dam crest elevation. Data were collected using small unmanned aerial system (sUAS), multibeam sonar, and terrestrial lidar.
Bed material grain size distributions for surficial samples from Iron Gate, Copco, and J.C. Boyle Reservoirs
This product summarizes the collection and analysis of bed material sample grain size distribution collected from the Iron Gate, Copco, and J.C. Boyle Reservoirs located in Northern California and Southern Oregon on the Klamath River. Samples were collected on June 16, 2020 from cores (less than 1m depth) and processed for the full size distribution.
Sediment grain-size data from the Klamath estuary, California
This data release includes grain-size measurements of sediment samples collected from the substrate surface and uppermost 10 cm of sediment deposits in the Klamath estuary, northern California. Samples were collected using a BMH-60 bed-material sampler deployed from a boat, or by hand trowel from subaerial or shallow-water (less than 0.5 m water depth) regions along the estuary margins...
Stage-Storage and Bed Material Data from the 2020 Upper Letts Lake Survey, California
On October 13, 2020 a survey of Upper Letts Lake was conducted where both bathymetric and terrestrial lidar data were collected. Additionally, six bed material samples and three core samples were collected to understand the characterization of the grain-size of the lake bed. Survey data were merged with an additional lidar dataset from the USGS 3DEP program to create digital elevation...
Repeat measurements of bathymetry, streamflow velocity and sediment concentration made during a high flow experiment on the Colorado River in Grand Canyon, March 2008
The acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP) data were collected and compiled to characterize the velocity patterns in channel of the Colorado River and in an adjacent zone of laterally recirculating flow (eddy). Topographic/bathymetric digital elevation models (DEMs) were collected and compiled to characterize erosion and deposition in the Colorado River and in an adjacent zone of...
Loch Lomond Reservoir 2019 Survey Data
This dataset contains the digital elevation model from the bathymetric survey, along with the sediment samples, stage-area table, stage-storage table, and 20-ft contours of the reservoir.
Bathymetry, Stage-Area, and Stage-Volume Tables for the San Antonio Reservoir, California, 2018
This dataset is associated with the following Scientific Investigations Report: Marineau, M.D., Wright, S.A, and Lopez, J.V., 2020, Storage capacity and sedimentation characteristics of the San Antonio Reservoir, California, 2018: U.S. Geological Survey Scientific Investigations Report 2019-5151, 34 p., https://doi.org/10.3133/sir20195151.
Turbidity and water temperature profile data in Don Pedro Reservoir, California, 2015-2016
This dataset includes water temperature and turbidity profiles collected in Don Pedro Reservoir, California, during 2015-2016.
Filter Total Items: 54
Hydrodynamic model of the Colorado River, Glen Canyon Dam to Lees Ferry in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Arizona
The U.S. Geological Survey constructed a two-dimensional hydrodynamic model that was applied to a 15.8-mile tailwater reach of the Colorado River in Glen Canyon that begins 0.25 mile downstream from Glen Canyon Dam and extends to Lees Ferry in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Arizona. The model used the Flow and Sediment Transport with Morphological Evolution of Channels (FaSTMECH)...
Authors
Scott A. Wright, Matthew A. Kaplinski, Paul E. Grams
A literature review and hypsometric analysis to support decisions on trout management flows on the Colorado River downstream from Glen Canyon Dam
Executive SummaryFish stranding has been studied in select rivers worldwide, often with the purpose of determining how to mitigate adverse effects of dam operations on highly valued salmon and trout populations. However, where a reduction in trout population size is desired by resource managers, as is the case downstream of the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River, flow manipulations...
Authors
Mariah Giardina, Josh Korman, Michael D. Yard, Scott Wright, Matthew A. Kaplinski, Glenn Bennett
Sediment transport in two tributaries to the San Joaquin River immediately below Friant Dam—Cottonwood Creek and Little Dry Creek, California
Two tributaries to the greater San Joaquin River watershed, Cottonwood and Little Dry Creeks, in California’s Central Valley, were assessed for sediment and streamflow dynamics between October 1, 2011, and September 30, 2019. The two systems deliver sediment to the San Joaquin River below Friant Dam, California. Dams create downstream discontinuities in streamflow and sediment transport...
Authors
Dan R.W. Haught, Mathieu D. Marineau, Justin Toby Minear, Scott Wright, Joan V. Lopez
Storage capacity and sedimentation characteristics of Loch Lomond Reservoir, California, 2019
In May of 2019, Loch Lomond Reservoir was surveyed by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in cooperation with the city of Santa Cruz to assess the current storage capacity and sedimentation rates in the reservoir. Survey methods combined sonar soundings to measure bathymetry and lidar scans with GPS data to measure near-shore topography and sediment bed samples to understand reservoir bed...
Authors
Daniel R. Whealdon-Haught, Scott Wright, Mathieu D. Marineau
Self-limitation of sand storage in a bedrock-canyon river arising from the interaction of flow and grain size
Bedrock-canyon rivers tend to be supply limited because they are efficient transporters of sediment and not because the upstream supply of sediment is small. A byproduct of this supply limitation is that the finer alluvium stored in these rivers has shorter residence times and smaller volumes than in alluvial rivers. To improve our understanding of disequilibrium sediment transport and...
Authors
David Topping, Paul Grams, Ronald E. Griffiths, David Dean, Scott Wright, Joel A. Unema
Causes of variability in suspended‐sand concentration evaluated using measurements in the Colorado River in Grand Canyon
Rivers commonly exhibit substantial variability in suspended‐sand concentration, even at constant water discharge. Here we derive an approach for evaluating how much of this variability arises from mean bed‐sand grain size. We apply this approach to the Colorado River in Grand Canyon, where discharge‐independent concentration of suspended sand varies by more than a factor of 23 (N = 1.4...
Authors
David M. Rubin, Daniel Buscombe, Scott Wright, David Topping, Paul Grams, John C. Schmidt, J.E. Hazel, Matthew A. Kaplinski, Robert B. Tusso
The future of sediment transport and streamflow under a changing climate and the implications for long-term resilience of the San Francisco Bay-Delta
Sedimentation and turbidity have effects on habitat suitability in the San Francisco Bay‐Delta (Bay‐Delta), concerning key species in the bay as well as the ability of the delta marshes to keep pace with sea level rise. A daily rainfall runoff and transport model of the Sacramento River Basin of northern California was developed to simulate streamflow and suspended sediment transport to...
Authors
Michelle A. Stern, Lorraine E. Flint, Alan L Flint, Noah Knowles, Scott Wright
Storage capacity and sedimentation characteristics of the San Antonio Reservoir, California, 2018
The San Antonio Reservoir is a large water storage facility in Alameda County, California, and is a major component of the Hetch Hetchy Regional Water System (RWS). The RWS is a water-supply system owned and operated by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) and provides water for about 2.7 million people in the San Francisco, Santa Clara, Alameda, and San Mateo Counties...
Authors
Mathieu D. Marineau, Scott Wright, Joan V. Lopez
Water resources on Guam—Potential impacts of and adaptive response to climate change
The goals of this joint U.S. Geological Survey, University of Hawaiʻi, University of Guam, University of Texas, and East-West Center study were to (1) provide basic understanding about water resources for U.S. Department of Defense installations on Guam and (2) assess the resulting effect of sea-level rise and a changing climate on freshwater availability, on the basis of historic...
Authors
Stephen B. Gingerich, Adam G. Johnson, Sarah N. Rosa, Mathieu D. Marineau, Scott Wright, Lauren E. Hay, Matthew J. Widlansky, John W. Jenson, Corinne I. Wong, Jay L. Banner, Melissa L. Finucane, Victoria W. Keener
Field-scale sediment feed flume: Upper Santa Ana River, California
Along the San Bernardino Valley, the Santa Ana River decreases in slope, increases in width, and deposits particles from boulders to sand as it loses transport capacity. Episodic rainfalls feed very large winter floods, but dry summer and fall periods lead to extensive dry alluvial reaches due to surface water infiltration into subsurface aquifers. Within one of these dry reaches, a...
Authors
Scott Wright, J. Toby Minear
Refining the Baseline Sediment Budget for the Klamath River, California
Four dams in the Klamath River Hydroelectric Project (KHP) in Oregon and California (Figure 1) are currently scheduled to be removed over a period of a few weeks or months, beginning in January 2021. The Klamath dam removal will be the largest in the world by almost all measures, and is an unprecedented opportunity to advance science of river responses to such events. The KHP contains...
Authors
Chauncey W. Anderson, Scott Wright, Liam N. Schenk, Katherine Skalak, Jennifer A. Curtis, Amy E. East, Adam Benthem
Dam effects on bedload transport on the upper Santa Ana River, California, and implications for native fish habitat
Dams disrupt the flow of water and sediment and thus have the potential to affect the downstream geomorphic characteristics of a river. Though there are some well‐known and common geomorphic responses to dams, such as bed armouring, the response downstream from any particular dam is dependent on local conditions. Herein, we investigate the response of the upper Santa Ana River in...
Authors
Scott Wright, J Toby Minear
Science and Products
Sediment transport, streamflow, and climate change: long-term resilience of the Bay-Delta
Sediment supply is important to the health of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and San Francisco Bay (Bay-Delta) ecosystem. Sediment eroded from upland source areas in the Sacramento and San Joaquin watersheds is transported through the rivers to the Bay-Delta where it is deposited in mudflats and tidal wetlands, which in turn helps protect against the effects of sea-level rise. Sediment...
Sediment Acoustics
The U.S. Geological Survey recognizes the need to provide sediment acoustic training and to develop standardized techniques and practices.
Mapping Sturgeon Spawning Habitat in the Lower San Joaquin River
The spawning of adult white sturgeon ( Acipenser transmontanus) in the lower San Joaquin River was documented recently by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) (Gruber and others, 2012; Jackson and Eenennaam, 2013). Streamflow on the San Joaquin River has been modified by State and Federal water project operations, and there are a variety of questions regarding the effects on fish...
Delta sediment measurements to support numerical modeling of turbidity
The purpose of the proposed work is to collect data that will support the development, calibration, and validation of numerical models of sediment transport and turbidity in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
Geomorphic Assessment and Restoration Alternatives Development for the Merced River in East Yosemite Valley, Yosemite National Park
The National Park Service (NPS) and USGS jointly will investigate impacts to the Merced River due to infrastructure and historic channel widening in east Yosemite Valley with a goal of constructing river management alternatives. Past management actions, such as gravel mining, channel riprap, and the construction of bridges that do not accommodate flood flows, have had long-lasting impacts to the...
Exploring: Reservoir Capacity And Sedimentation Of The Fena Valley Reservoir Guam
The Fena Valley Reservoir, located in southern Guam, is the primary source of water for the United States Naval Base Guam and nearby village residents. At full capacity, the reservoir surface area extends approximately 0.30 mi 2, and drains a watershed area of about 5.88 mi 2. After reservoir construction, periodic bathymetric surveys, coupled with sedimentation models, can be used to produce...
Surrogate Monitoring of Sediment Transport using Hydrophones along the San Joaquin River and Tributaries
Traditional methods for measuring coarse bedload sediment transport by discrete physical sampling tend to be labor intensive and expensive ( Gray and others, 2010). As such, bedload samples often are collected too infrequently to capture the temporal variability inherent in transport rates, which can vary significantly, sometimes by a factor of ten or more, over time periods of several minutes to...
San Antonio Reservoir Bathymetric Survey and Sedimentation Study
Over time, the flow of water into the San Antonio Reservoir has caused the build-up of sediment, decreasing storage capacity. Since water storage is a crucial issue in California, up-to-date information on the reservoir is needed. To accomplish this, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission approached the USGS California Water Science Center to conduct a bathymetric (depth) survey and other...
Monitoring the Impacts of the Rim Fire on Tuolumne River Water Quality
The Rim Fire has burned over 400 square miles of the Tuolumne River and Merced River watersheds in central California and is now the 3rd largest wildfire in state history. The burn area is largely on the Tuolumne between Hetch Hetchy Reservoir and Don Pedro Reservoir, both of which serve as critical sources of drinking water and irrigation water to San Francisco Bay area and Central Valley...
Implementing New Acoustic Monitoring Techniques in the Trinity River
Accurate river-sediment data is fundamental to planning and managing river restoration efforts on the Trinity River, and throughout the world’s waterways. The USGS has developed a “hydrophone” that enables scientists to listen to sediment particles as they move along the riverbed in order to inexpensively and reliably record near-continuous sediment-bedload-transport data. For this study...
The 'Digital Grain Size' Web and Mobile-Computing Application
This project team developed a Web-hosted application (that can also be used on mobile platforms) for automatic analysis of images of sediment for grain-size distribution, using the “Digital Grain Size” (DGS) algorithm of Buscombe (2013) (“DGS-Online,” 2015). This is a free, browser-based application for accurately estimating the grain-size distribution of sediment in digital images...
Colorado River milage system and ancillary attribute data for connecting to hydrodynamic model output in Glen Canyon, AZ
These data were compiled to support stranding risk modeling of young-of-year rainbow trout in Glen Canyon resulting from fluctuating flows from Glen Canyon Dam, called Trout Management Flows (TMFs). The objective of our study was to evaluate the stranding risk associated with different TMFs. We used the results of a 2-dimensional hydrodynamic model (Wright and others, 2024) as input to a...
Hydrodynamic model of the Colorado River, Glen Canyon Dam to Lees Ferry in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Arizona: tables of model results and accuracy assessment
These data were compiled to provide a resource for other researchers interested in water-surface elevations and flow velocity across a wide range of discharge in the study reach for the project. Objective(s) of our study were to construct a two-dimensional hydrodynamic model for the 15.8 mile tailwater reach of the Colorado River in Glen Canyon between Glen Canyon Dam and Lees Ferry...
Sediment grain-size data from the Klamath estuary, California
This data release supersedes version 1.0, published in November 2021 at https://doi.org/10.5066/P9CAZIHJ. Versioning details are documented in the accompanying Klamath_Grainsize_VersionHistory.txt file. This data release includes grain-size measurements of sediment samples collected from the substrate surface and uppermost 10 cm of sediment deposits in the Klamath estuary, northern...
Bathymetry, Stage-Area, and Stage-Volume Tables for the Calaveras Reservoir, California, 2019
Dataset contains reservoir bathymetry and shoreline topography up to dam crest elevation. Data were collected using small unmanned aerial system (sUAS), multibeam sonar, and terrestrial lidar.
Bed material grain size distributions for surficial samples from Iron Gate, Copco, and J.C. Boyle Reservoirs
This product summarizes the collection and analysis of bed material sample grain size distribution collected from the Iron Gate, Copco, and J.C. Boyle Reservoirs located in Northern California and Southern Oregon on the Klamath River. Samples were collected on June 16, 2020 from cores (less than 1m depth) and processed for the full size distribution.
Sediment grain-size data from the Klamath estuary, California
This data release includes grain-size measurements of sediment samples collected from the substrate surface and uppermost 10 cm of sediment deposits in the Klamath estuary, northern California. Samples were collected using a BMH-60 bed-material sampler deployed from a boat, or by hand trowel from subaerial or shallow-water (less than 0.5 m water depth) regions along the estuary margins...
Stage-Storage and Bed Material Data from the 2020 Upper Letts Lake Survey, California
On October 13, 2020 a survey of Upper Letts Lake was conducted where both bathymetric and terrestrial lidar data were collected. Additionally, six bed material samples and three core samples were collected to understand the characterization of the grain-size of the lake bed. Survey data were merged with an additional lidar dataset from the USGS 3DEP program to create digital elevation...
Repeat measurements of bathymetry, streamflow velocity and sediment concentration made during a high flow experiment on the Colorado River in Grand Canyon, March 2008
The acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP) data were collected and compiled to characterize the velocity patterns in channel of the Colorado River and in an adjacent zone of laterally recirculating flow (eddy). Topographic/bathymetric digital elevation models (DEMs) were collected and compiled to characterize erosion and deposition in the Colorado River and in an adjacent zone of...
Loch Lomond Reservoir 2019 Survey Data
This dataset contains the digital elevation model from the bathymetric survey, along with the sediment samples, stage-area table, stage-storage table, and 20-ft contours of the reservoir.
Bathymetry, Stage-Area, and Stage-Volume Tables for the San Antonio Reservoir, California, 2018
This dataset is associated with the following Scientific Investigations Report: Marineau, M.D., Wright, S.A, and Lopez, J.V., 2020, Storage capacity and sedimentation characteristics of the San Antonio Reservoir, California, 2018: U.S. Geological Survey Scientific Investigations Report 2019-5151, 34 p., https://doi.org/10.3133/sir20195151.
Turbidity and water temperature profile data in Don Pedro Reservoir, California, 2015-2016
This dataset includes water temperature and turbidity profiles collected in Don Pedro Reservoir, California, during 2015-2016.
Filter Total Items: 54
Hydrodynamic model of the Colorado River, Glen Canyon Dam to Lees Ferry in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Arizona
The U.S. Geological Survey constructed a two-dimensional hydrodynamic model that was applied to a 15.8-mile tailwater reach of the Colorado River in Glen Canyon that begins 0.25 mile downstream from Glen Canyon Dam and extends to Lees Ferry in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Arizona. The model used the Flow and Sediment Transport with Morphological Evolution of Channels (FaSTMECH)...
Authors
Scott A. Wright, Matthew A. Kaplinski, Paul E. Grams
A literature review and hypsometric analysis to support decisions on trout management flows on the Colorado River downstream from Glen Canyon Dam
Executive SummaryFish stranding has been studied in select rivers worldwide, often with the purpose of determining how to mitigate adverse effects of dam operations on highly valued salmon and trout populations. However, where a reduction in trout population size is desired by resource managers, as is the case downstream of the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River, flow manipulations...
Authors
Mariah Giardina, Josh Korman, Michael D. Yard, Scott Wright, Matthew A. Kaplinski, Glenn Bennett
Sediment transport in two tributaries to the San Joaquin River immediately below Friant Dam—Cottonwood Creek and Little Dry Creek, California
Two tributaries to the greater San Joaquin River watershed, Cottonwood and Little Dry Creeks, in California’s Central Valley, were assessed for sediment and streamflow dynamics between October 1, 2011, and September 30, 2019. The two systems deliver sediment to the San Joaquin River below Friant Dam, California. Dams create downstream discontinuities in streamflow and sediment transport...
Authors
Dan R.W. Haught, Mathieu D. Marineau, Justin Toby Minear, Scott Wright, Joan V. Lopez
Storage capacity and sedimentation characteristics of Loch Lomond Reservoir, California, 2019
In May of 2019, Loch Lomond Reservoir was surveyed by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in cooperation with the city of Santa Cruz to assess the current storage capacity and sedimentation rates in the reservoir. Survey methods combined sonar soundings to measure bathymetry and lidar scans with GPS data to measure near-shore topography and sediment bed samples to understand reservoir bed...
Authors
Daniel R. Whealdon-Haught, Scott Wright, Mathieu D. Marineau
Self-limitation of sand storage in a bedrock-canyon river arising from the interaction of flow and grain size
Bedrock-canyon rivers tend to be supply limited because they are efficient transporters of sediment and not because the upstream supply of sediment is small. A byproduct of this supply limitation is that the finer alluvium stored in these rivers has shorter residence times and smaller volumes than in alluvial rivers. To improve our understanding of disequilibrium sediment transport and...
Authors
David Topping, Paul Grams, Ronald E. Griffiths, David Dean, Scott Wright, Joel A. Unema
Causes of variability in suspended‐sand concentration evaluated using measurements in the Colorado River in Grand Canyon
Rivers commonly exhibit substantial variability in suspended‐sand concentration, even at constant water discharge. Here we derive an approach for evaluating how much of this variability arises from mean bed‐sand grain size. We apply this approach to the Colorado River in Grand Canyon, where discharge‐independent concentration of suspended sand varies by more than a factor of 23 (N = 1.4...
Authors
David M. Rubin, Daniel Buscombe, Scott Wright, David Topping, Paul Grams, John C. Schmidt, J.E. Hazel, Matthew A. Kaplinski, Robert B. Tusso
The future of sediment transport and streamflow under a changing climate and the implications for long-term resilience of the San Francisco Bay-Delta
Sedimentation and turbidity have effects on habitat suitability in the San Francisco Bay‐Delta (Bay‐Delta), concerning key species in the bay as well as the ability of the delta marshes to keep pace with sea level rise. A daily rainfall runoff and transport model of the Sacramento River Basin of northern California was developed to simulate streamflow and suspended sediment transport to...
Authors
Michelle A. Stern, Lorraine E. Flint, Alan L Flint, Noah Knowles, Scott Wright
Storage capacity and sedimentation characteristics of the San Antonio Reservoir, California, 2018
The San Antonio Reservoir is a large water storage facility in Alameda County, California, and is a major component of the Hetch Hetchy Regional Water System (RWS). The RWS is a water-supply system owned and operated by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) and provides water for about 2.7 million people in the San Francisco, Santa Clara, Alameda, and San Mateo Counties...
Authors
Mathieu D. Marineau, Scott Wright, Joan V. Lopez
Water resources on Guam—Potential impacts of and adaptive response to climate change
The goals of this joint U.S. Geological Survey, University of Hawaiʻi, University of Guam, University of Texas, and East-West Center study were to (1) provide basic understanding about water resources for U.S. Department of Defense installations on Guam and (2) assess the resulting effect of sea-level rise and a changing climate on freshwater availability, on the basis of historic...
Authors
Stephen B. Gingerich, Adam G. Johnson, Sarah N. Rosa, Mathieu D. Marineau, Scott Wright, Lauren E. Hay, Matthew J. Widlansky, John W. Jenson, Corinne I. Wong, Jay L. Banner, Melissa L. Finucane, Victoria W. Keener
Field-scale sediment feed flume: Upper Santa Ana River, California
Along the San Bernardino Valley, the Santa Ana River decreases in slope, increases in width, and deposits particles from boulders to sand as it loses transport capacity. Episodic rainfalls feed very large winter floods, but dry summer and fall periods lead to extensive dry alluvial reaches due to surface water infiltration into subsurface aquifers. Within one of these dry reaches, a...
Authors
Scott Wright, J. Toby Minear
Refining the Baseline Sediment Budget for the Klamath River, California
Four dams in the Klamath River Hydroelectric Project (KHP) in Oregon and California (Figure 1) are currently scheduled to be removed over a period of a few weeks or months, beginning in January 2021. The Klamath dam removal will be the largest in the world by almost all measures, and is an unprecedented opportunity to advance science of river responses to such events. The KHP contains...
Authors
Chauncey W. Anderson, Scott Wright, Liam N. Schenk, Katherine Skalak, Jennifer A. Curtis, Amy E. East, Adam Benthem
Dam effects on bedload transport on the upper Santa Ana River, California, and implications for native fish habitat
Dams disrupt the flow of water and sediment and thus have the potential to affect the downstream geomorphic characteristics of a river. Though there are some well‐known and common geomorphic responses to dams, such as bed armouring, the response downstream from any particular dam is dependent on local conditions. Herein, we investigate the response of the upper Santa Ana River in...
Authors
Scott Wright, J Toby Minear