Charlestown, RI Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 3 miles east of Charlestown, RI
Nothing alarming measured 3 miles east of Charlestown, RI: whatever shift USGS's transects picked up here is too small to call reliably one way or the other, which this site reports as "no significant trend" rather than forcing a direction.
The grain of this number
Charlestown, RI is the nearest named place, 3 miles away, to a ~3.5-mile stretch of coast USGS has surveyed - the reading below covers that whole stretch, not a single property in it. Segment center: 41.37, -71.57. USGS's New England / Mid-Atlantic assessment last surveyed this stretch through 2007-2009, computing the rate with its LRR method. Other US regions were surveyed in different years, sometimes decades apart, so this page states its own rather than implying one national vintage.
What backs this reading up
This reading comes from 19 individual transects averaged together, 95% of which measured erosion rather than growth. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.38 ft/yr. The unadjusted figure here, -0.15 ft/yr, would place it 566 of 1211 if ranked directly - but an unreliable rank isn't a useful one, which is exactly why "no significant trend" is the headline instead. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. Copalis Beach, WA sits at national rank 1105 for growth (0.99 ft/yr), one reference point among the 1211 scored segments, 2584 miles from here. 1.3 miles away, Charlestown, RI is the nearest other measured stretch: also no significant trend.
One address near Charlestown: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.