Belleair Beach, FL Coastal Erosion Rate
Shoreline change 0.5 miles northeast of Belleair Beach, FL
The coast 0.5 miles northeast of Belleair Beach, FL shows no statistically significant trend either way. USGS's transects measured a rate here, but it's smaller than the survey's own margin of error for this stretch, so calling it "eroding" or "growing" would overstate what the data actually shows.
What this reading actually covers
Nothing here is parcel-level. USGS's raw transects run every few hundred feet along the shore; this page averages the ones nearest Belleair Beach, FL into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 27.93°N, 82.83°W. The survey behind it runs to 2001, in USGS's Gulf of Mexico assessment, using the LRR method. Shoreline surveys aren't repeated every year, so this is the most recent long-term measurement USGS has published for this coast, not a live reading.
What backs this reading up
Averaging 49 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 51% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. USGS's confidence interval here is ±1.32 ft/yr. Taken at face value, this segment's raw -0.04 ft/yr reading would land it 719 of 1211 nationally - a number worth ignoring, since it's statistical noise rather than a real trend. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2004-1089. For scale: Crescent City, CA, 2504 miles away, ranks 1131 of 1211 nationally for growth, 1.27 ft/yr. 1.9 miles away, Belleair, FL is the nearest other measured stretch: also no significant trend.
One address near Belleair Beach: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.