Dauphin Island, AL Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 4.2 miles east of Dauphin Island, AL?
Nothing alarming measured 4.2 miles east of Dauphin Island, AL: 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.
What "Dauphin Island" means on this page
Dauphin Island, AL is the nearest named place, 4.2 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: 30.25, -88.10. 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 100 individual transects averaged together, 62% of which measured erosion rather than growth. Uncertainty on this specific number: 1.17 ft/yr either side. The unadjusted figure here, -0.2 ft/yr, would place it 499 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. East Atlantic Beach, NY sits at national rank 1172 for growth (2.39 ft/yr), one reference point among the 1211 scored segments, 1078 miles from here. 3 miles away, Dauphin Island, AL is the nearest other measured stretch: moderate erosion at 2.38 ft/yr.
One address near Dauphin Island: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.