Imperial Beach, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 2.7 miles northwest of Imperial Beach, CA
Nothing alarming measured 2.7 miles northwest of Imperial Beach, CA: 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
Imperial Beach, CA is the nearest named place, 2.7 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: 32.60, -117.13. The survey behind it runs to 1852-2016, in USGS's California 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.
Where this fits nationally
This reading comes from 112 individual transects averaged together, 13% of which measured erosion rather than growth. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.31 ft/yr. The unadjusted figure here, 0.2 ft/yr, would place it 924 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 National Shoreline Change data release (ScienceBase, DOI 10.5066/P94J0K7Z), Kratzmann 2024 / Data Report 1187. Rank 1203 nationally for growth belongs to Chatham, MA, 2637 miles from this stretch, measured at 5.4 ft/yr. Imperial Beach, CA, 2.8 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, itself no significant trend.
One address near Imperial Beach: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.