Surfside Beach, TX Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 2.1 miles north of Surfside Beach, TX?
Unusual good news for this stretch: the shoreline 2.1 miles north of Surfside Beach, TX has grown by a measured 0.69 feet a year on average, per USGS's long-term transect data for this section. At that rate, the shoreline has gained roughly 6.9 feet over the last decade.
The grain of this number
Surfside Beach, TX is the nearest named place, 2.1 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: 28.98, -95.29. Survey years: 2001, method LRR, from USGS's Gulf of Mexico 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.
What 0.69 ft/yr means over time
Holding the 0.69 ft/yr accretion rate 2.1 miles north of Surfside Beach, TX for 25 years would add roughly 17 feet of shoreline, again assuming nothing about the local sediment supply changes.
How solid is this number
52 transects feed this segment's number; 19% of them individually measured retreat. The published margin on this reading runs ±0.6 ft/yr. Among the 1211 US coastal segments with a measurable trend, this one ranks 1059 for erosion, 1 being the fastest-retreating coast in the dataset. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2004-1089. Huntington Beach, CA sits at national rank 1103 for growth (0.98 ft/yr), one reference point among the 1211 scored segments, 1376 miles from here. 2.7 miles up the coast, Surfside Beach, TX shows the same lack of a significant trend.
One address near Surfside Beach: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.