DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18435286
title: Satellite-derived time-series of shoreline change along the US East Coast

description: This repository contains 40 years of tidally-corrected shoreline change time-series for sandy coastlines along the East Coast of the USA derived from Landsat imagery.The time-series were last updated in January 2026.  For the latest data always refer to http://coastsat.space/.

This dataset was first released by USGS, see the following data releases: https://doi.org/10.5066/P9BQQTCI , https://doi.org/10.5066/P9W91314 and https://doi.org/10.5066/P1WFZXDM). 

CoastSat was used to map shoreline changes on Landsat 5, Landsat 7 and Landsat 8 imagery between 1984 and 2025. The Coastsat toolbox is publicly available at https://github.com/kvos/CoastSat and described in Vos et al. 2019, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2019.104528. The time-series of shoreline change were tidally-corrected along cross-shore transects using tide levels from a global tide model (FES2022) and a satellite-derived estimate of the beach slope (as described in Vos et al. 2020, "Beach slopes from satellite-derived shorelines", https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GL088365). Sean Vitousek from USGS prepared the spatial layers used as input in CoastSat and contributed to the creation of this dataset.

This dataset covers wave-dominated sandy coasts from Delaware to Texas, including a total of 301 beaches and 68,000 cross-shore transects (100-m alongshore spaced). This includes coastlines in Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Missisipi, Louisiana and Texas.

The data is contained in the /shoreline_data folder and structured as follows:



There is a folder for each site (e.g. usa_DE0001 to usaTX0033)

In each site folder, there are 4 CSV files:



time_series_tidally_corrected.csv: this file contains the tidally-corrected time-series of shoreline change along each transect belonging to the site (e.g. usa_DE0001-0001, usa_DE0001-0002 etc). This is the final product used for coastal change analyses.

time_series_raw.csv: this file contains the raw time-series of shoreline change, which have not be tidally-corrected. Note that each image is taken at a different stage of the tide.

tide_levels_fes2022: this file contains the tide levels at the time of image acquisition extracted from FES2022 (global tide model publicly available on AVISO+).

transect_coordinates_and_beach_slopes.csv: this file contains the coordinates (in WGS84 lat/lon coordinates) as well as the estimated beach slope for each transect, including confidence intervals.




  In addition, there are three geospatial layers (.GeoJSON) which contain important spatial information:



 polygons.geojson: this layer contains the polygons that were used to run CoastSat for each beach.

shorelines.geojson: this layer contains the sandy shorelines used as a referenced in CoastSat. Each beach has the following attributes: id, mean long-term trend (in  m/year), median slope and slope confidence interval.

transects.geojson: this layer contains the cross-shore transects which are spaced 100 m along each beach and start at a non-erodible point. Each transect has the following attributes: id, site_id, linear trend (in m/year). beach slope, lower and upper bounds for the slope estimate.