West Ocean City, MD Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 1.1 miles east of West Ocean City, MD?
1.1 miles east of West Ocean City, MD: 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.
The grain of this number
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 West Ocean City, MD. Centered near 38.35°N, 75.09°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.
What backs this reading up
111 transects feed this segment's number; 82% of them individually measured retreat. The published margin on this reading runs ±0.46 ft/yr. Taken at face value, this segment's raw -0.37 ft/yr reading would land it 363 of 1211 nationally - a number worth ignoring, since it's statistical noise rather than a real trend. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. San Clemente, CA sits at national rank 980 for growth (0.34 ft/yr), one reference point among the 1211 scored segments, 2380 miles from here. Ocean City, MD, 2.8 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, itself no significant trend.
One address near West Ocean City: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.