In coastal areas of the United States, where water and land interface in complex and dynamic ways, it is common to find concentrated residential and commercial development. These coastal areas often contain various landholdings managed by Federal, State, and local municipal authorities for public recreation and conservation. These areas are frequently subjected to a range of natural hazards, which include flooding and coastal erosion. In response, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is compiling existing reliable historical shoreline data to calculate rates of shoreline change along the conterminous coast of the United States, and select coastlines of Alaska and Hawaii, as part of the Coastal Change Hazards priority...
This data release contains mean high water (MHW) shorelines along the coast of California for the years 1998/2002, 2015, and 2016, extracted from Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) digital elevation models using ArcGIS. The Digital Shoreline Analysis System (DSAS) was used to calculate net shoreline movement (NSM) between the pre-El Niño (2015) and post-El Niño (2016) shorelines, as a proxy for sandy shoreline change throughout the El Niño winter season. For a longer-term perspective of background shoreline behavior, end-point rates (EPR) of change were also calculated between the 1998/2002 and the 2016 shorelines.
