Geologic Publications for Mount Rainier

Behind the curtain: Developing methods and toolkits supporting practical assessment of discharge and bedload of the Nisqually River within Mount Rainier National Park

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Author(s): Zoe Zawol, Taylor R. Kenyon

Category: POSTER
Document Type: Poster 16
Publisher: Seismological Society of America Annual meeting, 14-18 April 2026, Pasadena, California
Published Year: 2026
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Abstract:
Impacts from a changing climate continue to drive changes in the hydrology, geomorphology, and inherent variability of the world's rivers. Upland watersheds with strongly coupled fluvial/hillslope dynamics are especially vulnerable to these effects, leaving mountainous watersheds in a precarious position. Classic methods for hydrologic monitoring are almost exclusively developed for rivers with slopes of <0.001 m/m, leaving steep mountain rivers comparatively unstudied, and slow to advance by comparison. This work seeks to continue efforts from the Mount Rainier National Park (MORA) Imminent Threats Program to address research gaps pertaining to the continuous measurement of discharge and sediment transport in mountain rivers with a slope ≥0.02 m/m, furthering our understanding of impacts to morphodynamic processes advancing into downstream communities.

Containing widely distributed low-resilience infrastructure, significant increases to precipitation intensities, and glacial recession rates greater than 0.1 m/day, the Nisqually River of MORA exemplifies the nexus of modern land management issues driven by climate stressors of the Pacific Northwest. With this study, we seek to further characterize observable surface processes in the Nisqually watershed within MORA and consider new frameworks enabling reliable monitoring of steep mountain rivers.

Here, we continue the efforts to refine the use of seismic analysis focused on pristine mountain rivers by creating tools to package analyses, and testing combinations of field practices for calibrating model frameworks. We combine visualization and data selection tools to aid large data management of our repository (>10TB), targeting analysis for time periods of interest. We also attempt to use experimental schema of active-source calibration testing for stations within a remote monitoring network to determine Green's function parameters, moving from relative monitoring toward quantifying discharge and bedload. If successful, MORA will finally begin collecting a record of river discharge after 127 years of management.

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In Text Citation:
Zawol and Kenyon (2026) or (Zawol and Kenyon, 2026)

References Citation:
Zawol, Z. and T.R. Kenyon, 2026, Behind the curtain: Developing methods and toolkits supporting practical assessment of discharge and bedload of the Nisqually River within Mount Rainier National Park: Poster 16, Seismological Society of America Annual meeting, 14-18 April 2026, Pasadena, California,