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Beach foreshore slope for the West Coast of the United States

Metadata Updated: April 18, 2024

This data release contains foreshore slopes 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. Finally, the regression was evaluated at the elevation of Mean High Water (MHW) to yield the location of the shoreline. In some areas there was more than one lidar survey available; in these areas the slopes from each survey are provided. While most of the slopes are for sandy beaches, there is some slope data from rocky headlands and other steeper beaches. These data files (slopeData_WestCoast.csv and slopeData_WestCoast.shp) contain beach slope, the location the beach slope data was calculated (the shoreline position), and the estimated uncertainty of the shoreline position. The accompanying data files (referenceLine_WestCoast.csv and referenceLine_WestCoast.shp) contain information about the reference baseline, the cross shore transects, and the MHW values used to estimate the shoreline location. The csv and shapefiles contain the same information, both file types are provided as a convenience to the user.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

Downloads & Resources

Dates

Metadata Created Date April 18, 2024
Metadata Updated Date April 18, 2024

Metadata Source

Harvested from DOI EDI

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date April 18, 2024
Metadata Updated Date April 18, 2024
Publisher U.S. Geological Survey
Maintainer
@Id http://datainventory.doi.gov/id/dataset/e69b8506bfc6261f5db6e4fa69897df5
Identifier USGS:65a0296bd34e5af967a3841d
Data Last Modified 20240410
Category geospatial
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 010:12
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://datainventory.doi.gov/data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id cd69762a-9a6c-424f-928a-92ef5a15cb48
Harvest Source Id 52bfcc16-6e15-478f-809a-b1bc76f1aeda
Harvest Source Title DOI EDI
Metadata Type geospatial
Old Spatial -124.74,32.53,-117.12,48.35
Publisher Hierarchy White House > U.S. Department of the Interior > U.S. Geological Survey
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 7d6197b62538e61c6033753017ca1c5691d5f6227936345cd98556ff2337b9cf
Source Schema Version 1.1
Spatial {"type": "Polygon", "coordinates": -124.74, 32.53, -124.74, 48.35, -117.12, 48.35, -117.12, 32.53, -124.74, 32.53}

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