About CoastErosionCheck
Why this exists
Searching "is my beach eroding" mostly turns up either a news story about one storm or a vague national statistic. USGS has actually measured this, stretch by stretch, since the 1990s, through its National Assessment of Shoreline Change program. CoastErosionCheck takes that public data and makes it searchable by the name of a real town, which USGS's own transect files don't carry.
What goes into the number
Every reading traces to USGS's regional shoreline-change Open-File Reports, which digitize historical shoreline positions (from old survey maps through recent lidar) and fit a long-term rate of change per transect. This site averages the transects nearest each named place into one ~3.5-mile segment and applies USGS's own published confidence interval to decide whether the result is a real trend or statistical noise - full method in the methodology guide.
Segment grain, honestly labeled
USGS's own transects run every few hundred feet, finer than any one property, but too fine to search by name since they carry no place name at all. This site works at the ~3.5-mile segment level and says so on every page, including exactly how far the named town actually is - and links to USGS's own live Coastal Change Hazards Portal for the parcel-level view.
Written by
The segment pages on CoastErosionCheck are generated with AI tools working directly from USGS's own published transect data, not reported by a named journalist. Each page's numbers are computed from the source files rather than paraphrased from another site, and the methodology guide documents exactly how.
Who runs this
CoastErosionCheck is an independently run site. It is not affiliated with USGS, NOAA, or any insurance carrier or contractor. Where a page includes a sponsored or affiliate link, that is disclosed on the page itself and in the privacy policy.