2010 profile-derived mean high water shorelines of the South Coast of MA used in shoreline change analysis

Publication Date

2018-11-26

Time Period

2013-12-20

Himmelstoss, E.A., Farris, A.S., and Weber, K.M., 2018, Massachusetts shoreline change project: A GIS compilation of vector shorelines for the 2018 update: U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P9O7S72B.

This mean high water (MHW) datum-based shoreline dataset was extracted using a profile method. The profile method for extracting shorelines was developed for open-ocean coasts. Shoreline positions serve as easily understood features that can be used to describe the movement of beaches through time. These data are combined with other shoreline positions and used to calculate rates of shoreline change. When this datum-based MHW shoreline is compared to historic proxy-based high water line shorelines there may be some artificial seaward offset of the historic data that is a known unidirectional offset between proxy-based and datum-based shoreline features. This shoreline data has an associated uncertainty table that quantifies the measurement and positional errors associated with this lidar shoreline, a proxy-datum bias value that corrects for the unidirectional offset between the mean high water (MHW) elevation of the lidar and the high water line (HWL) shorelines, as well as a measurement uncertainty in the total water level.

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