Pacific Rim Shoreline Change Time-Series from Landsat Imagery, 1984-2025

Kilian Vos from UNSW Sydney provides 40 years of tidally-corrected shoreline change time-series for sandy coastlines around the Pacific Rim. The dataset covers approximately 3,000 beaches and over 100,000 cross-shore transects derived from Landsat 5, 7, and 8 imagery between 1984 and 2025. Data was last updated in January 2026 and was used in published research on the impact of ENSO on beach erosion and accretion.

Use Cases

• Analyzing long-term erosion and accretion patterns based on 40 years of tidally-corrected shoreline positions.
• Investigating the impact of ENSO events on beach behavior across the Pacific basin.
• Modeling coastal change using beach slope estimates and tide-level data from a global model.
• Validating satellite-derived shoreline mapping tools like the CoastSat toolbox on a large scale.

Strengths

• Covers 40 years of consistent observations from 1984 to 2025.
• Includes data for approximately 3,000 beaches and over 100,000 cross-shore transects.
• Shoreline positions are tidally-corrected using a global tide model (FES2022) and estimated beach slopes.
• Associated with peer-reviewed research published in Nature Geoscience.

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• Covers only wave-dominated sandy coasts in the Pacific basin where Landsat imagery was available, excluding other coast types and regions.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred from file descriptions after download.

Provenance

Source

Kilian Vos, UNSW Sydney

Collection Method

Derived from Landsat 5, 7, and 8 imagery using the CoastSat toolbox, with tidal correction from the FES2022 global tide model.

Time Range

1984 to 2025

Freshness

Time-series were last updated in January 2026.

Geography

Sandy coastlines in the Pacific basin, including Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Chile, Peru, Mexico, and the USA (California and Hawaii).