Klamath, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 3 miles northwest of Klamath, CA
0.44 feet a year: that is the measured retreat rate USGS's transects show for the coast 3 miles northwest of Klamath, CA, averaged across the full historical record surveyed here. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 4.4 feet over the last decade.
The grain of this number
Nothing here is parcel-level. USGS's raw transects run every few hundred feet along the shore; this page averages the ones nearest Klamath, CA into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 41.60°N, 124.10°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
If 0.44 ft/yr holds for the next 25 years, the coast 3 miles northwest of Klamath, CA would retreat roughly 11 more feet, a projection, not a certainty: erosion rates shift with storms, sediment supply and any armoring built in the meantime.
How solid is this number
Averaging 50 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 94% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.23 ft/yr. Sorted from fastest erosion to fastest growth across all 1211 measured segments nationally, this one lands at 329. Source: USGS National Shoreline Change data release (ScienceBase, DOI 10.5066/P94J0K7Z), Kratzmann 2024 / Data Report 1187. For scale: Pescadero, CA, 321 miles away, ranks 326 of 1211 nationally for erosion, 0.45 ft/yr, 1.0x this stretch's rate. Klamath, CA, 2.8 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, reading slight erosion at 0.44 ft/yr.
Klamath, CA on the source map: try the Coastal Change Hazards Portal, zoomable well past this page's ~3.5-mile grain.