Auxiliary material for
Testing morphodynamic controls on the location and frequency of river avulsions on fans
versus deltas: Huanghe (Yellow River), China
Vamsi Ganti1, Zhongxin Chu2, Michael P. Lamb1, Jeffrey A. Nittrouer3, and Gary Parker4
1
Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, California Institute of Technology, 1200
E. California Blvd., MC 170-25, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA (vganti@caltech.edu).
2
College of Marine Geosciences, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, 266100, China.
3
Department of Earth Science, Rice University, 6100 Main Street, Houston, TX 77005,
USA.
4
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Department of Geology,
Hydrosystems Laboratory, University of Illinois, 301 N. Mathews Ave., Urbana, IL
61801, USA.
Geophysical Research Letters
Introduction
The auxiliary material includes a file titled ‘text01.pdf’, which contains further
information on the data sources and accompanying calculations that support our results.
This document contains four sections and a summary of these sections is provided here.
In Section 1, we provide details of the sediment transport capacity calculations, which
indicate that there is likely an order of magnitude decrease in the sediment transport
capacity of the Huanghe as it exits the Loess plateau. A table in included in this section
that summarizes the input and output values of this simple modeling exercise. In Section
2, we provide an alternate map of river avulsions (which is slightly different from the one
reported in the main text) at the Lijin site and discuss the linear regression analysis that
was performed on the temporal evolution of the backwater-mediated avulsion node. This
section is accompanied by a figure that illustrates the location of the backwater-mediated
avulsion nodes. In Section 3, we provide the cross-section data at three sites on the Lower
Huanghe from which the net aggradation rate was computed. This section is accompanied
by a figure of the cross-sections during a 50-year period. Finally, in Section 4 we provide
the data sources for the water stage-height variability computation and illustrate that
water surface elevation variability is higher at the Huanghe delta node when compared to
other rivers reported in Figure 3 of the main text.