Publications

Wildfire risk has increased in recent decades over many regions, due to warming climate and other factors. Increased sediment export from recently burned landscapes can jeopardize downstream infrastructure and water resources, but physical landscape response to fire has not been quantified for some at-risk areas, including much of northern California, USA. We measured sediment yield from...

Over the past 200 years of written records, the Hawaiian Islands have experienced tens of tsunamis generated by earthquakes in the subduction zones of the Pacific "Ring of Fire" (e.g., Alaska-Aleutian, Kuril-Kamchatka, Chile, and Japan). Mapping and dating anomalous beds of sand and silt deposited by tsunamis in low-lying areas along Pacific coasts, even those distant from subduction...

Sediment pulses can cause widespread, complex changes to rivers and coastal regions. Quantifying landscape response to sediment-supply changes is a long-standing problem in geomorphology, but the unanticipated nature of most sediment pulses rarely allows for detailed measurement of associated landscape processes and evolution. The intentional removal of two large dams on the Elwha River...

Waves propagating over broad, gently-sloped shallows decrease in height due to frictional dissipation at the bed. We quantified wave-height evolution across 7 km of mudflat in San Pablo Bay (northern San Francisco Bay), an environment where tidal mixing prevents the formation of fluid mud. Wave height was measured along a cross shore transect (elevation range−2mto+0.45mMLLW) in winter...

Measurements were collected on a shallow estuarine mudflat in northern San Francisco Bay to examine the physical processes controlling waves, turbulence, sediment resuspension, and their interactions. Tides alone forced weak to moderate currents of 10–30 cm s-1 in depths of 0–3 m, and maintained a background suspension of 30–50 mg L21 of fine sediment. In the presence of wind waves...