San Clemente, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
Shoreline change 5.5 miles southeast of San Clemente, CA
Nothing alarming measured 5.5 miles southeast of San Clemente, 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 "San Clemente" means on this page
San Clemente, CA is the nearest named place, 5.5 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: 33.38, -117.57. 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.
How solid is this number
Averaging 16 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 100% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.35 ft/yr. The unadjusted figure here, -0.23 ft/yr, would place it 477 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. Rank 1069 nationally for growth belongs to Stone Harbor, NJ, 2396 miles from this stretch, measured at 0.73 ft/yr. 1.8 miles up the coast, San Clemente, CA shows the same lack of a significant trend.
San Clemente, CA on the source map: try the Coastal Change Hazards Portal, zoomable well past this page's ~3.5-mile grain.