Surfside Beach, TX Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 1.7 miles west of Surfside Beach, TX?
1.7 miles west of Surfside Beach, TX: USGS's transects didn't pick up a trend here that beats the survey's own uncertainty. That's the majority case nationally, and for this stretch specifically it means the coast is holding, not that the data failed to find anything.
What "Surfside Beach" means on this page
This is a roughly 3.5-mile stretch of coast, not one address or parcel - USGS's own transects run every few hundred feet, but that's finer than any one property needs, so this page reports the stretch nearest Surfside Beach, TX. Centered near 28.95°N, 95.31°W. 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
Averaging 95 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 2% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. USGS's confidence interval here is ±3.46 ft/yr. Taken at face value, this segment's raw 1.63 ft/yr reading would land it 1145 of 1211 nationally - a number worth ignoring, since it's statistical noise rather than a real trend. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2004-1089. For scale: Dillon Beach, CA, 1706 miles away, ranks 1029 of 1211 nationally for growth, 0.53 ft/yr. 1.9 miles away, Quintana, TX is the nearest other measured stretch: also no significant trend.
Surfside Beach, TX on the source map: try the Coastal Change Hazards Portal, zoomable well past this page's ~3.5-mile grain.