Huntington Beach, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 2.7 miles west of Huntington Beach, CA?
2.7 miles west of Huntington Beach, CA, the coast is advancing, not retreating, at a measured 0.39 feet a year, sediment accumulating faster than any erosion USGS recorded here. At that rate, the shoreline has gained roughly 3.9 feet over the last decade.
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 Huntington Beach, CA into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 33.70°N, 118.05°W. USGS's California assessment last surveyed this stretch through 1852-2016, 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.
25 years at this rate
Holding the 0.39 ft/yr accretion rate 2.7 miles west of Huntington Beach, CA for 25 years would add roughly 10 feet of shoreline, again assuming nothing about the local sediment supply changes.
Where this fits nationally
Averaging 133 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 8% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. The published margin on this reading runs ±0.26 ft/yr. Sorted from fastest erosion to fastest growth across all 1211 measured segments nationally, this one lands at 993. Source: USGS National Shoreline Change data release (ScienceBase, DOI 10.5066/P94J0K7Z), Kratzmann 2024 / Data Report 1187. For scale: Coronado, CA, 85 miles away, ranks 1158 of 1211 nationally for growth, 2.04 ft/yr, 5.2x this stretch's rate. 2.2 miles up the coast, Huntington Beach, CA shows the same lack of a significant trend.
One address near Huntington Beach: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.