Narragansett Pier, RI Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 1.3 miles south of Narragansett Pier, RI
Nothing alarming measured 1.3 miles south of Narragansett Pier, RI: 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
Narragansett Pier, RI is the nearest named place, 1.3 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: 41.41, -71.46. Survey years: 2007-2009, method LRR, from USGS's New England / Mid-Atlantic 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.
How solid is this number
60 transects feed this segment's number; 13% of them individually measured retreat. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.29 ft/yr. The unadjusted figure here, 0.18 ft/yr, would place it 912 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 Open-File Report 2010-1119. Atlantic City, NJ sits at national rank 1159 for growth (2.07 ft/yr), one reference point among the 1211 scored segments, 210 miles from here. Narragansett Pier, RI, 2 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, reading slight erosion at 0.22 ft/yr.
Narragansett Pier, RI on the source map: try the Coastal Change Hazards Portal, zoomable well past this page's ~3.5-mile grain.