Panama City Beach, FL Coastal Erosion Rate
Shoreline change 2.8 miles east of Panama City Beach, FL
Good news, and an honest one: USGS's data can't distinguish this stretch, 2.8 miles east of Panama City Beach, FL, from a flat trend. Whatever small movement it measured here is statistical noise, not a reliable direction, so none is claimed.
The grain of this number
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 Panama City Beach, FL, rather than showing one arbitrary line. Segment center: 30.22, -85.83. The survey behind it runs to 2001, in USGS's Gulf of Mexico 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
31 transects feed this segment's number; 0% of them individually measured retreat. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.6 ft/yr. The unadjusted figure here, 0.27 ft/yr, would place it 955 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 2004-1089. For scale: East Atlantic Beach, NY, 988 miles away, ranks 1172 of 1211 nationally for growth, 2.39 ft/yr. Panama City Beach, FL, 1.8 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, itself no significant trend.
Not this whole stretch, just Panama City Beach itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.