So today I'm gonna, um, talk about modern day mapping, mapping that's
currently happening and a cup of out of the hundreds of studies and
mapping project sing I'm gonna highlight to, um, one being aerial
photography and the other being the bath metric mapping were doing till
track sediments down there are the the effects of the dam on the
settlement down their main primarily san, um, these air big projects that
involve hundreds of people in the end, I am, I'm not. I guess I have the
loudest mouth. So they put me up here to talk about these things. But
these projects are, uh, are, uh, cooperative efforts. And even in the
modern day, we think of them as expeditions that involve a lot of people,
a lot of effort. And I'm one of many folks, um, that are involved in these.
I could spend the whole time, uh, thanking and recognizing the other
people involved in this project. I'Ll just move along
go back,
okay?
And make a plug before I get started to the Grand Canyon Monitoring and
Research Center, the US Geological Survey office that coordinates all the
research and monitoring associated with this program. They have a really
nice website. They have all kinds of information available online. The
aerial photography is available online. You can pull up pictures, current
pictures from daily cameras. There's they have, ah, searchable library
that has a bunch of, uh, what we called Brahe Literature. Bureau of
Reclamation reports Park Service reports that aren't necessarily peer
reviewed. Journal articles are available through their website, so I
wanted to give a shout out, um, the wrong way forward. You can also access
all of the gauge data and plug in your own dates and look at what the
floes air doing at any one time. This is, uh, January of this year. You
could build your own chain settlement mass balance things. So there's a
lot, a lot of really good stuff that that webs on that website. Um, so I
want to start
and I'm going to use this is the discharge Haida graf from the least very
gage. I just notice I forgot toe label the Y Axis Parla. Apologies. This
is, um, this tart tied a graft from nineteen. Twenty two January of this
year. This is in cubic feet per second. This is the amount of water
flowing past the least very gauge shown in blue. And of course, it's
pretty obvious where and when the dam was closed, the the construction
closure of the Glen Canyon Dam eliminated the spring snowmelt flood peaks
that you see here to the left of the damn closure and replaced it with
this this vastly different flow regime that had some pretty significant
impacts on the downstream environment that lead to the the environmental
impact statement on the effects of the dam keep going the wrong way. After
the dam was closed from nineteen sixty three up until nineteen ninety, the
the releases from the dam were unrestricted that they had these daily
fluctuations that were on Lee. Concerned with generating power, they
fluctuated from very low flows. One thousand three thousand C. F s up to
the maximum capacity of the of the generators to thirty three thousand,
which if you're running the river down there, that's that. That could be
up to a two to three meter tide coming in every day. Those fluctuations
caused a lot of erosion of the beaches and lead to
the
that concern over all those effects led to the development of the
environmental impact statement.
And in nineteen ninety, um, starts an era of environmental management
where, if you could see that the flows are are, quite, uh, there's
restrictions on how low you can go. The ramping great how far you can go
up and down with the river. And it's it's within this environmental
management era that I'm going to highlight. Be mapping efforts for.
There you go. So, yeah. So zoom in. Zooming in. Uh, on this hydra graft
from nineteen. Eighty to the present, um, showing a couple administrative
, uh, milestones. So the Glen Canyon Dam environmental impact statement
started nineteen. Ninety, nineteen ninety two. Uh, Grand Canyon Protection
Act was passed. The record of decision took six years to make a decision
on the thing. It was the longest, most expensive environmental impact
statement in the in the in the country up to that date. Um and then in
ninth in two thousand twelve, we started this hft protocol. H f E stands
for high flow events for
controlled floods. Call it what you want. Those air dam releases above
power plant capacity and the intent with these is to is to bring the damn
up into is big of a flood. As you can get in the post, Tamera,
redistribute the sediment, rebuild the eroded sandbars and also to
introduce re introduce an element of disturbance to the system. That and
so starting in two thousand twelve,
weigh in. Nineteen ninety six was the first controlled flutter hft,
and there were three of them done. And there was quite an administrative
battle to get those those floods because they have to bypass the power
plant. So there are a lot of people's mind they're wasting, um, money by
bypassing the power plant. Anyways, in two thousand twelve, we've started
this protocol where the floods air triggered by settlement inputs from the
tributaries. So it's, um it's not quite as much of a struggle anymore. But
these, uh, this the high flow protocol led to or the development of the
high profile flow protocol led to the development of the channel mapping
program that I'm going to talk about it in a little bit here, um, going
the wrong way. So here's the mapping efforts. A timeline of the mapping
efforts I'm going to talk about today. First, the Aero Photography Canyon
wide aerial photographs were collected in two thousand to two thousand
nine and two thousand thirteen, and in two thousand nine we started this
channel mapping effort on DH. Continue that to this day. I still got some
work left to do.
Of course, all of the survey effort efforts down there we've heard about
the benchmarks being developed by the Mathis surveys and Washburn out and
his points helicopter to his points. Good times for surveyors when you you
get a helicopter ride. Um, also all of the studies down there, um, are
based on this control network of benchmarks. They provide a common data
for all the monitoring projects down there. There's over fifteen hundred
benchmarks along the river corridor. There's a bunch of them scattered
about the region up on the rims. They all have G N s s, which is the new
term for GPS. GPS is the U. S. Satellite constellation. There's a GLONASS
constellation. There's EUROSEC referred to his G N SS now, and total
station measurements there adjusted and a least squares adjustment
framework to provide subs. Mostly sub sentiment. Our accuracy on each one
of those points down there. Some of them Well, we don't need to go. Um, so
we use the Arizona State Plain, Central zone in meters, uh, with, uh, Nat
eighty three lip. Side heights is our projection. So everything out of the
program comes in this in this, uh, geodetic dedic parameters. We do run
into some issues. Well, I don't have time to go into it. I want to want to
get onto the actual mapping project. But we would really like to form our
own projected in the Canyon with the Central Meridian something like this
, so we could get away from the distortion of things out to the side of
the projection.
I had to throw that in for the survey. Bro's over there.
So here's a Here's a map of those control points again. Different
projection. If we zoom in on the point hands Borough region, you can see
these points down along the river. They're everywhere down there. And this
box here is where we're going to go to next. Have a lot of examples today
from the Eminence area is one of my favorite places in the world. Andi. So
when I get to make example map so usually make him of that area. So here's
this is the two thousand nine digital photograph, um, and showing the
control points down down along the rivers and you can see that you can.
You go down there to serve a. You've got a lot of options for benchmarks
in this particular place, which is kind of nice. They're not not not as,
uh, numerous everywhere, but down here, they're in this area. There's
quite a few of them. These benchmarks along the river are typically
described X is theirs? A lot of the old survey marks? Are these rusty
nails, um, bolt the newer marks or these brass pins that we set in in the
holes? There's there's occasional caps you confined and up on the rim
There, the monuments are a little easier to find. Sometimes looking for
the scribe Dex is on Iraq can be quite a challenge.
And to do the surveying down there, we used these benchmarks. We set up
all our instruments on these benchmarks and utilize them, Tio provide a
common reference frame for all the mapping.
No. So, of course, some benchmarks are better than others. And sometimes
with this data, that's line of its line of sight data. You've got to put
the gun where you can where you need to see if you get stuck on a rock in
the middle of the river. They're worse fates. So onto the aerial
photography.
So again, missions were flown in two thousand to two thousand nine. Two
thousand thirteen. Using these fancy German push broom sensors collected
digital four band red, green, blue and near infrared data. The product is
is it's a digital ortho photograph using this tiling scheme, uh, quarter
quads tiling scheme that you can just pull in to it, G I s or what?
Whatever system you want and make your own river maps, if you'd like.
There are twenty centimeter ground revel resolution. And they also come
with a digital surface model product. That's photograph dramatically
derived from the from the air, photos with a one meter self resolution.
This. These photographs are just primarily of the river corridor about a
half a kilometre So wide part of the river corridor. Um, here's the flight
plan flight path. Zoom in on the Little Colorado confluence. Um, each
segment is flown with five to six parallel linear flight lines that
overlap, so there's quite a bit of flying happening out there. Um, this is
a discharge. Hide a graph to show that the photographs are collected at a
constant flow released from the dam of eight thousand C. F s. There's
three line the Lee's ferry gauges in the dark line here these air Grand
Canyon and the diamond. So the flight window starts when the flow gets
down to eight thousand. So you have a consistent level of the water in the
photographs. As much as we can control that during the missions we use, we
have a lot of ground support operations, each one of these bent benchmarks
on the rim. We have two benchmarks at least two, usually three to four
stations within thirty kilometers of the collection area, with a GPS NSS
base station collecting one second data. There's a helicopter flying out
here, Tio, we download those receivers. Helicopter grabs that data and
grabs the data from the airplane processes that night. If there's any
issues than we go and re fly that data just to ensure the the quality of
this data collection, we also put over one hundred. Over one hundred
panels are down there on a bench marks along the river. We put these one
meter square panels in there, too. Uh, help with the rectification of the
photos and provide horizontal and vertical, um, ground control.
If we go back to the eminence area and zoom in on this red box, you can
see one of those photo panels in the two thousand nine photos right up
there. There's photo panel on a point.
In addition to the photo panels, we also collect topographic data down
there to check the ramifications that air done. So we have thousands of
points down along the river that we usedto check the vendor and provide
control on our on the digital surface model. Here's an example of that one
meter sell digital surface model showing that's not that's is actually a
rockfall, not a debris fall. This is that one that's right up above
between Buck Farm and, uh, forty three mile. If you're familiar with the
place, um, photo and tooth out our digital surface model in two thousand
nine and in two thousand three, you can actually see up here where there's
a little piece in the shadow here that peeled off and went all the way
down into the river. So, yeah, so here's the This little chunk up here
fell off into the river, So that's an example of the, uh, real nice
resolution on that and these these voters are being used like Carl said,
Carlston said the other day. These, uh, the topography that's collected
down there starts this process of, um, the idea's explode around this
topography, and these in the the same is true for the photography. So we
use these. A number of studies use. Um, this is an example of campsite
mapping used. There's the near infrared for the for the vegetation, a lot
of vegetation Surveys used this aerial photography to map out the plant
species down there in different zones around the river. This is a real
neat one by Bedford at all recently that looks at the Tamarisk Beetle
impact, and they used this automated classifications scheme to come up
with percentage of beetle impacted areas for the whole canyon.
So that's it for the for the aerial photography. I wanna move now onto
this channel mapping project we use. This is a digital elevation model, a
quarter meter resolution elevation model of a piece of the channel down
there. This is about three hundred meters long. Um, the purpose of this
mapping is to monitor the sediment, um, and construct these morphological
based sediment budgets.
Along with that is a basic topographic mapping of a blank area on the map
in Grand Canyon. So to this day, there's blank areas on the map that were
still filling it. We're still standing on the shoulders of those giants
that we've heard about all day where all the last couple days, um, we've
got this is a map showing the amount we've mapped from the Glen Canyon Dam
down to Phantom Ranch and from National Canyon down to Diamond Creek,
about one hundred sixty miles of channel, we have mapped we've got about
seventy miles to go to complete a map of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado
River in the canyon. The way we construct these maps As we combine on the
right side, you'LL see the different data collect three different types of
data we've collected. Teo produce thes one meter grid cell evolution
resolution maps of the channel. We start by doing total station surveys
above the water and in places, shallow areas where the boats can't get
those air shown in red on the upper map. Here there's a spread of points
again in the eminence area. Andi, we combined Those with sonar surveys
sounded navigation ranging, um, and we have two different types of sonar
down there. We use single beam shown in yellow on the upper map and multi
beam serving, which comprises about eighty five percent of the area of
these surveys, which is a it's swath serving. It puts out of one hundred
forty degree sloth under the boat, and you drive up and down the channel
to map that we've got these special purpose built boats that have to
navigate the rapids and keep all the electronic safe. Um, great to see
Mark Gonzalez here. We started working and he started developing these
boats back in the early two thousand's. We've continued his legacy and
kept up with the technology. This is an example of tape of doing a survey.
Here's the survey Consuls to screen. You have the sonar wedge on this
side navigation screen, and here's an example. This is during a survey.
It's about four meters deep, and here's the boat in the white area is the
area that's unmapped, and we are literally filling in those blank areas.
It's like driving a Zamboni. Err driving you dry your most. You're out
there mowing the grass, and you better not leave any strips in between.
And it's it's It's an amazing job. We're very lucky to do it. Here's an
example from Glad you showed that Cave Springs the bird's eye expedition
Having a bad day right at the top of Cave Spring's Here, This is this Is
that these air? The track lines of the boat used to collect the topography
in this pool. Pretty cool pool down below cave spring. There's a big red
wall ledge there. This is one of the deeper holes about twenty four meters
deep there, Um, of course, we use these to to map changes and sediment and
produce change maps and look at the dynamics of how the settlements moving
around down here again. The Eminence Poole. This is the survey in two
thousand nine. This is two thousand twelve. You just simply subtract those
two digital elevation models and you come up with these change maps that
show you where the sand is being eroded, where it's being deposited and
you scale these surveys up. Tio thirty mile stretch is Here's that
eminence pool here, um, and come up with these assessments of sediment. So
again, we've we've got one hundred sixty miles mapped, Uh, in two thousand
nine and two thousand twelve, we repeated this section and Lower Marble
Canyon two thousand eleven. In two thousand fourteen, we repeated the
section from the Little Colorado River down the Phantom Ranch. We did a
really fun survey up in Glen Canyon, the fifteen miles from the dam down
the least ferry on the controlled flood in two thousand fourteen. It's
very shallow up there. So they when they released that high flow, we
jumped on the opportunity to get a little depth under our transducers. Two
thousand thirteen two thousand sixteen. We repeated Lee's ferry, too, uh,
thirty Mile Gage, and in two thousand seventeen, we went from national
down to diamond cream
This is a slide that answers the age old question. How deep is the river?
This is the over eight and a half million cells of the one meter digital
elevation model's the depth of the river at eight thousand. Um, the red
line is a normalized, a normal population. So somebody asked you how deep
the river is and say about five meters, five, six meters. Um, so we could
do things like like this to characterize the channel with what the depths
are of the channel we can look at. How the channel. This is a graph
showing the large scale control of the river level. Geology blue is the
average river depth per mile. Green is the river wit, and sure enough,
when the rivers wider, it's shallower when the river's narrow wave can
statistically proven.
What we already know, that the channel is deeper towards the middle and
it's shallower towards either side.
To get a long time to get there. I'Ll just keep going here, and we can
answer all kinds of questions about the movement of the sediment in the
effects of the dam on the sediment. I'm not going to go through These is
their examples of what we could do with the data. Another data set that we
, uh, collect along with the depths is called backscatter. Um, and this is
so this is what the multi beam receivers listening to it's like it makes a
ping listening. Listening ping. That's the bottom you can take the back
scatter is the analysis of this return signal that the amplitude in the
shape of that on here's a map of it on a perspective. You,
the the substrate that the sound bounces off of has a different shape,
depending on whether it's mud, whether it's sand with earth rocks, so you
can analyze that return signal or the backscatter and come up with maps of
what the substrate type is. So for all the mapping down there, we have the
topography and way Have
a map of what the substrate is based on that backscatter signal, Um, we've
done this Also, this is an example from Glen Canyon, where it's very
vegetated. These air, um, camera locations that we've taken observations
of. We've done the veg, the classifications from the back scatter and the
match of the actual ground. Truth to this, uh, backscatter mapping is
about eighty five ninety percent. So it's it's pretty amazing. My
colleague Dan bus come is really good at processing signal. Um, another
real fund study we did was down a Diamond Creek way. Did some repeat
mapping of this section to look at, um, how much settlement is transported
along the bed of the river, not just in the water column. So we repeated
these surveys, and we've made a video of this. Each frame of this video is
a pass of the multi beam
I actually worked for a Grand Canyon. One research center right out of
school. So I took the cable car.
Don't create many, many times, uh, collecting suspended sentiment in bed
material samples. But I have two simple questions. Where does the funding
come from? What's the end goal?
Uh, you have two questions. One's easy to answer, once filled, trickier.
The this program is funded. It's called the Glen Canyon Dam Environ
Adaptive Management Program.
Are the funds come from?
Well, they just changed. Last. You might have heard in the in October.
There was Cem, uh, the current administration.
Did not allow power revenues from the dam to be transferred to the bureau
for their environmental program, EMS.
So previous to this year, the money came from power revenues at the dam
when this kerfuffle came along. The funding now comes from appropriated
funds. Senator, There's couple senators that attached a rider to a bill
toe, um, provide the funding to the Bureau of Reclamation. For
there's two or three upper Colorado River Basin endangered species
recovery programs, the Glen Canyon Dam, the Grand Canyon program. And
there's a couple other projects, and there's twenty three million dollars
a year. The Glen Canyon Dam Environmental Studies is a, UH, eleven million
dollars a year program.
Uh, and the Grand Canyon Protection Act as well. So yeah, and there's a
lot of fisheries work going on down there that, uh, endangered species
work. The Grand Canyon Protection Act is a much broader piece of
legislation specifically for Grand Canyon that says they have to operate
the dam with the downstream environment in mind. So there's sediment
studies. There's studies of impacts to cultural, um, programs, native fish
,
a lot of different studies going on down there with the end goal of trying
to managed the dam to mitigate and the effects of the dam on the
downstream environment.
Okay? Just you raised my curiosity when you started talking about Sloan
arm in nineteen. Fifty nine. There was a couple of boats sunk
intentionally. Pipes Creek, then never is a plane crash up river that
augured in. Do you find things other than settlement?
No.
Is this short? Well, we haven't found any planes. We haven't found any. We
have found some tires right downstream from Lee's ferry. We also found I
think we did that survey. We saw a motor on the bed of the river. The
Revolution resolution of the of the sonar is good enough to find it, but I
don't think that stuff stays. Stays around for very long, though. These
were fiberglass boats and the plane was melas. Just curious, because I
know we haven't seen it. We don't serve a in the rapids. Also was another
point. Those sensors that air in the water pretty expensive. So we picked
him up out of the water. Well, just a heads up. If you happen to notice,
these anomalies are probably excite You. Okay, Thanks. We'LL look for him.
Okay, We've got time for one more question. One more question you had.
Sounds like this is classic mapping at its finest. Can you give us an
insight going forward with some of the like planet labs? Say the Landsat
satellites, the European satellites, the rule Maybe that drones will play
with regard to, you know, high resolution light are and so forth. I mean,
how will that technology impact our knowledge to expand on what you've
done? Well, that we've tried to get some drone flights down there. Uh,
drone fights are not allowed in the national park at this moment, but
certainly were looking. Teo, apply that technology.
To the canyon environment.
We're getting to a point where you have to ask yourself how How much do
you know? How far do you want to zoom into that topography? Like we could
do light our overflights. You Khun Dio structure from motion. Uh,
extraction of topography from overlapping aero photos from drones. You
could map things, Teo. You could get, like, one centimeter contour lines
on some of these places that the question is, why Why would you want to
know that? Um, but certainly we're looking at applying at these new
technology. Not sure about any of the land set Aerial photography? Uh,
yeah, the satellite based photo missions. I know they're out there, but we
haven't used him. I think we're going to schedule another overflight of
the river court are here in the next couple years that we can use to
further our understanding of and monitoring of the changes down,
especially in the vegetation. But we're skipping skipping the video
because I think that's what crashed it. But I had some slight after that
that I want to share with you. Just like five minutes, maybe less. You
guys call it that. All right,
Thanks, Matt. Nick and Matt, the real real driver behind things here. Yeah
, keep going for indulging me, But I have I ended the slide with sort of a
tour of some images of the surveys from the damn downstream. There's, I
think, five or six of them that I wanted to share with you because either
these air areas that have never been mapped until now and it's a Grand
Canyon mapping conference and I wanted to share that with you. Yeah, right
there. Yep, that's it.
So obviously starting at the dam. That's what the better the river looks
like right under the dam. And I got to tell you, it was an amazing
experience coming up right next to the damn. I had a sticker in my hand
ready, but we never got that close. But it was. It is a weird sensation
right there. Things air humming and moving. Anyways, that's the, uh, all
of these air digital elevation models with have a bunch of different
shading techniques. But I think you get the gist that, you know, that's
deep. That's shallow. Um,
this is I'm glad Robert showed the picture of the bridge. This is the
Marble canyon bridges, the old bridge. Here's the new one. I over laid the
topography. This is typically rapids in the Grand Canyon. All of them are
formed at tributary side canyons, where the side canyons debris flows,
deliver a bunch of coarse grained sediment to it to the river that pinches
the river, informs rapids and riffles. This is the on ly man made riffle
their debris flow in Grand Canyon right under the bridge. Um, probably
partially due to construction of the bridge and partially do Teo, the
sport of
post dam construction's going out anyways. We don't know why it's there,
but it's definitely manmade. Um, and there's a deep, deep pool below the
other bridge. This is Thies Air. This is a twenty five centimetre
resolution digital elevation model of right above Badger Rapid is right
here and these air these beautiful dune field above badger wrap it.
Uh, this is, uh, the Saddle Canyon camps. The main saddle campus here.
There's an Eddie here. You can see the amazing dune structure within
eddies and the dunes in the downstream. In the run out, you go past the
sandbar. Um, this is an example of a sixty mile of the changes that can
occur. The beautiful changes these air to Pete's ledges here. Um, and this
was two thousand thirteen, two thousand fourteen survey. Um, there there
are. There's up to about three or four meters of change in the Eddie over
here over that year. Time. Um, this is, uh, here's Phantom Ranch. Is the
South Kaibab Trail coming in over. Laid on the south cab bridge, The boat
beach. This is the lower cremation camp. If you're familiar with it, this
is the deepest point that we've surveyed so far. It's twenty six meters
deep at eight thousand cubic feet per second. So with that seventy miles
that we have left, I'm sure there's Cem pools that are of this magnitude,
but so that the deepest the how deep is the river. It's averages about
five to six meters deep. The deepest holes about twenty six about a
hundred feet deep. So, um, can't wait to get down there and get the rest
of them surveyed. So we have a full a mix of it. This is I really love
this. This one I put it in because it shows the these air ledges of bright
angel sandstone. This is at mile one seventy one. This is the Stairway
Canyon debris fan, and this is Mohawk Canyon down here. Just some
beautiful structure in the in the dunes and resolution on the the ledges.
And finally, I believe this is the final one. This is, uh this is the map
right there, showing this almost perfectly circular bow shock around
Vulcans. Anvil. That's the Vulcan anvil right there. And, uh, there's just
this big circle around. I thought that was pretty neat. And so that's what
I wanted to share what they had. Thanks for indulging me, Nick and Matt
and Matt for bringing this back up. Thanks. You guys have a greatlunch