Watch Hill, RI Coastal Erosion Rate
Shoreline change right at Watch Hill, RI
0.33 feet a year: that is the measured retreat rate USGS's transects show for the coast right at Watch Hill, RI, averaged across the full historical record surveyed here. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 3.3 feet over the last decade.
The grain of this number
Nothing here is parcel-level. USGS's raw transects run every few hundred feet along the shore; this page averages the ones nearest Watch Hill, RI into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 41.32°N, 71.85°W. USGS's New England / Mid-Atlantic assessment last surveyed this stretch through 2007-2009, 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 0.33 ft/yr holds for the next 25 years, the coast right at Watch Hill, RI would retreat roughly 8 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
90 transects feed this segment's number; 93% of them individually measured retreat. Uncertainty on this specific number: 0.12 ft/yr either side. Among the 1211 US coastal segments with a measurable trend, this one ranks 390 for erosion, 1 being the fastest-retreating coast in the dataset. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. Slidell, LA sits at national rank 59 for erosion (4.59 ft/yr), one reference point among the 1211 scored segments, 1230 miles from here. 1.7 miles up the coast, Watch Hill, RI shows 0.81 ft/yr of eroding.
One address near Watch Hill: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.