Newport Beach, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 2.7 miles southwest of Newport Beach, CA
The coast 2.7 miles southwest of Newport Beach, CA is actually gaining ground, not losing it: USGS's transects measure 0.94 feet of accretion a year here, sediment building up rather than washing away. At that rate, the shoreline has gained roughly 9.4 feet over the last decade.
What "Newport Beach" means on this page
USGS surveys the coast in transects spaced a few hundred feet apart; this page groups the nearest ones into a single ~3.5-mile reading for the stretch closest to Newport Beach, CA, rather than showing one arbitrary line. Segment center: 33.60, -117.90. 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.
What 0.94 ft/yr means over time
Holding the 0.94 ft/yr accretion rate 2.7 miles southwest of Newport Beach, CA for 25 years would add roughly 24 feet of shoreline, again assuming nothing about the local sediment supply changes.
What backs this reading up
89 transects feed this segment's number; 2% of them individually measured retreat. The published margin on this reading runs ±0.53 ft/yr. Among the 1211 US coastal segments with a measurable trend, this one ranks 1098 for erosion, 1 being the fastest-retreating coast in the dataset. Source: USGS National Shoreline Change data release (ScienceBase, DOI 10.5066/P94J0K7Z), Kratzmann 2024 / Data Report 1187. Rank 1114 nationally for growth belongs to El Segundo, CA, 37 miles from this stretch, measured at 1.04 ft/yr, 1.1x this stretch's rate. 2.3 miles up the coast, Costa Mesa, CA shows 0.48 ft/yr of accreting.
Newport Beach, CA on the source map: try the Coastal Change Hazards Portal, zoomable well past this page's ~3.5-mile grain.