Sandy ocean beaches are a popular recreational destination, often surrounded by communities containing valuable real estate. Development is on the rise despite the fact that coastal infrastructure is subjected to flooding and erosion. As a result, there is an increased demand for accurate information regarding past and present shoreline changes. To meet these national needs, the Coastal and Marine Geology Program of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is compiling existing reliable historical shoreline data along open-ocean sandy shores of the conterminous United States and parts of Alaska and Hawaii as part of the Coastal Change Hazards programmatic focus, formerly the National Assessment of Shoreline Change project.
There is no widely accepted standard for analyzing shoreline change. Existing shoreline data measurements and rate calculation methods vary from study to study and prevent combining results into state-wide or regional assessments. The impetus behind this national scale project was to develop a standardized method of measuring changes in shoreline position that is consistent from coast to coast. The goal was to facilitate the process of periodically and systematically updating the results in an internally consistent manner. In this release, three new tidal datum-based mean high water (MHW) shorelines extracted from 2009-2011, 2015, and 2016 lidar elevation data are included in the analysis (coverage not necessarily continuous statewide). The full range of shoreline data is 1852 to 2016. The proxy-datum bias correction has been applied on a transect-by-transect basis to reconcile offsets between the MHW shorelines and proxy-based HWL shorelines for the entire California coastal region which is divided into three subregions: Northern California (NorCal), Central California (CenCal), and Southern California (SoCal). In the previous report (Hapke et al., 2006), the proxy-datum bias correction was only applied to regional shoreline averages. This shoreline change update for California reports proxy-datum bias corrected rates when that information was computed while extracting shoreline positions from lidar data. In areas where the methods for delineating shorelines did not include computing bias correction values, the rates are reported without that correction. The proxy-datum bias concept is explained further in Ruggiero and List (2009) and in the process steps of the metadata file associated with the transect rates.