Reference baselines used to extract shorelines for the West Coast of the United States

This data release contains reference baselines for primarily open-ocean sandy beaches along the west coast of the United States (California, Oregon and Washington). The slopes were calculated while extracting shoreline position from lidar point cloud data collected between 2002 and 2011. The shoreline positions have been previously published, but the slopes have not. A reference baseline was defined and then evenly-spaced cross-shore beach transects were created. Then all data points within 1 meter of each transect were associated with each transect. Next, it was determined which points were one the foreshore, and then a linear regression was fit through the foreshore points. Beach slope was defined as the slope of the regression. [...]