Imperial Beach, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 1.9 miles south of Imperial Beach, CA
Nothing alarming measured 1.9 miles south 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, 1.9 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: 32.54, -117.12. Survey years: 1852-2016, method LRR, from USGS's California 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.
Where this fits nationally
21 transects feed this segment's number; 100% of them individually measured retreat. Uncertainty on this specific number: 0.41 ft/yr either side. The unadjusted figure here, -0.22 ft/yr, would place it 489 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 958 nationally for growth belongs to Moss Landing, CA, 396 miles from this stretch, measured at 0.27 ft/yr. Imperial Beach, CA, 1.4 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, itself no significant trend.
Not this whole stretch, just Imperial Beach itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.