Pajaro Dunes, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 1.3 miles south of Pajaro Dunes, CA
Nothing alarming measured 1.3 miles south of Pajaro Dunes, 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 "Pajaro Dunes" means on this page
Pajaro Dunes, CA 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: 36.85, -121.81. The survey behind it runs to 1852-2016, in USGS's California assessment, using the LRR method. Shoreline surveys aren't repeated every year, so this is the most recent long-term measurement USGS has published for this coast, not a live reading.
What backs this reading up
121 transects feed this segment's number; 38% of them individually measured retreat. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.25 ft/yr. The unadjusted figure here, 0.14 ft/yr, would place it 887 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. Coronado, CA sits at national rank 1158 for growth (2.04 ft/yr), one reference point among the 1211 scored segments, 389 miles from here. 1.9 miles away, Pajaro Dunes, CA is the nearest other measured stretch: slight accretion (beach growing) at 0.45 ft/yr.
One address near Pajaro Dunes: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.