Corpus Christi, TX Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 19.1 miles south of Corpus Christi, TX?
Good news, and an honest one: USGS's data can't distinguish this stretch, 19.1 miles south of Corpus Christi, TX, from a flat trend. Whatever small movement it measured here is statistical noise, not a reliable direction, so none is claimed.
The grain of this number
USGS surveys the coast in transects spaced a few hundred feet apart; this page groups the nearest ones into a single ~3.5-mile reading for the stretch closest to Corpus Christi, TX, rather than showing one arbitrary line. Segment center: 27.50, -97.29. Survey years: 2001, method LRR, from USGS's Gulf of Mexico shoreline-change assessment. That's how current the data is here, real, but not a live feed, since a shoreline survey is a major undertaking, not an annual check-in.
What backs this reading up
This reading comes from 106 individual transects averaged together, 96% of which measured erosion rather than growth. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.98 ft/yr. The unadjusted figure here, -0.2 ft/yr, would place it 502 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 2004-1089. Rank 1045 nationally for growth belongs to Gardiner, OR, 1868 miles from this stretch, measured at 0.59 ft/yr. 1.9 miles up the coast, Corpus Christi, TX shows the same lack of a significant trend.
One address near Corpus Christi: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.