The phrase "describes a phenomenon" is correct and can be used in written English.
You can use it to refer to a particular occurrence or set of occurrences that must be observed, recognized, and understood in order to explain why a particular outcome occurred. For example: "This report describes a phenomenon of an increased demand for organic food products."
Fromkin describes a phenomenon that is different to ordinary criminal activity or warfare.
It's a circular argument that conflates what describes a phenomenon and what causes it.
Freud describes a phenomenon that he calls "the narcissism of small differences", in which groups feud over distinctions that, to the outside, seem totally trivial.
Put simply, the network effect describes a phenomenon in which the value of a product goes up as more people use it.
Robert Sherman Belmont Hills, Pa .Aviv describes a phenomenon that scholars have been tracking for some time: "transnational motherhood," or "mothering across borders".
The term, coined in a 2005 paper by the University of Exeter psychologists Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam, now of the University of Queensland, describes a phenomenon in which companies promote women in times of crisis.
In 1942, the American physiologist Walter Cannon described a phenomenon called "voodoo death," observed in Aboriginal cultures.
Michael Goldfarb is describing a phenomenon of family-flight that has long been a part of the metropolitan experience.
For several years, political analysts and insiders have been using that term to describe a phenomenon in voting patterns that runs right across denominational lines.
In 2007, Stanford researchers described a phenomenon they called the "Proteus effect," where people internalize the characteristics of their online avatars.
One of the things my father was dismayed about is that a word he coined to describe a phenomenon he considered ghastly has become used to describe something that all parties claim as their lodestar".
