Time-series of shoreline change along the Pacific Rim

This repository contains 30+ years of tidally-corrected shoreline change data along the Pacific Rim. This data set was used in Vos et al. 2021, "Large regional variability in coastal erosion caused by ENSO", to investigate the impact of ENSO on interannual shoreline variability in the Pacific Basin.

CoastSat was used to map shoreline changes on Landsat 5, 7 and 8 imagery. The time-series of shoreline change were tidally-corrected along cross-shore transects using tide levels from a global tide model (FES2014) and a satellite-derived estimate of the beach slope (as described in Vos et al. 2020, "Beach slopes from satellite-derived shorelines").

This data set covers wave-dominated sandy beaches in the Pacific basin where Landsat imagery was available, a total of 3,071 beach and 122,122 cross-shore transects (100-m alongshore spaced). This includes coastlines in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Chile , Peru, Mexico and USA (California and Hawaii only).

The data is structured as follows:

• There is a folder for each country (e.g. Australia)
•  In the country folder, there is a folder for each site (e.g. aus0001, aus0002 etc)
• In the 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. aus0001-0001, aus0001-0002 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_fes2014: this file contains the tide levels at the time of image acquisition extracted from FES2014 (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.

  In addition, there are four 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 that were used to generate the cross-shore transects (also used as reference shorelines in CoastSat). Each beach has the following attributes: beach length, median orientation, median slope, and mean springs tidal range.
• transects.geojson: this layer contains the cross-shore transects, which are spaced 100 m along each beach. Each transect has the following attributes: orientation, beach slope, linear trend (in m/year), alongshore distance relative to the northern end of the beach (absolute and normalised).
• transects_edit.geojson: this layer is the same as transects.geojson where transects that are not suitable for shoreline mapping were deleted (rocky shores, submerged reef, coastal lagoons and inlets, coastal defences etc...)