Monterey, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures right at Monterey, CA
Nothing alarming measured right at Monterey, 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.
What this reading actually covers
Monterey, CA is the nearest named place, 0.1 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: 36.60, -121.88. 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
This reading comes from 33 individual transects averaged together, 88% of which measured erosion rather than growth. Uncertainty on this specific number: 0.26 ft/yr either side. The unadjusted figure here, -0.25 ft/yr, would place it 448 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. Warrenton, OR sits at national rank 1195 for growth (4.41 ft/yr), one reference point among the 1211 scored segments, 668 miles from here. Sand City, CA, 1.6 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, reading slight erosion at 0.42 ft/yr.
Not this whole stretch, just Monterey itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.