Santa Barbara, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 2.3 miles west of Santa Barbara, CA?
Nothing alarming measured 2.3 miles west of Santa Barbara, 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.
The grain of this number
Santa Barbara, CA is the nearest named place, 2.3 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: 34.41, -119.75. 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.
How solid is this number
81 transects feed this segment's number; 85% of them individually measured retreat. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.12 ft/yr. The unadjusted figure here, -0.09 ft/yr, would place it 666 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. For scale: Atlantic Beach, NY, 2529 miles away, ranks 1170 of 1211 nationally for growth, 2.35 ft/yr. 2.7 miles away, Eastern Goleta Valley, CA is the nearest other measured stretch: also no significant trend.
One address near Santa Barbara: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.