Pismo Beach, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
Shoreline change 0.4 miles northwest of Pismo Beach, CA
0.52 feet a year: that is the measured retreat rate USGS's transects show for the coast 0.4 miles northwest of Pismo Beach, CA, averaged across the full historical record surveyed here. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 5.2 feet over the last decade.
What "Pismo Beach" means on this page
Nothing here is parcel-level. USGS's raw transects run every few hundred feet along the shore; this page averages the ones nearest Pismo Beach, CA into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 35.16°N, 120.68°W. USGS's California assessment last surveyed this stretch through 1852-2016, computing the rate with its LRR method. Other US regions were surveyed in different years, sometimes decades apart, so this page states its own rather than implying one national vintage.
25 years at this rate
If 0.52 ft/yr holds for the next 25 years, the coast 0.4 miles northwest of Pismo Beach, CA would retreat roughly 13 more feet, a projection, not a certainty: erosion rates shift with storms, sediment supply and any armoring built in the meantime.
How solid is this number
This reading comes from 3 individual transects averaged together, 100% of which measured erosion rather than growth. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.11 ft/yr. Among the 1211 US coastal segments with a measurable trend, this one ranks 295 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 374 nationally for erosion belongs to Charlestown, RI, 2659 miles from this stretch, measured at 0.35 ft/yr, 0.7x this stretch's rate. 2.4 miles away, Avila Beach, CA is the nearest other measured stretch: slight erosion at 0.36 ft/yr.
One address near Pismo Beach: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.