The University of Rhode Island has published six decades of beach measurements online, making one of the longest continuous shoreline survey efforts in the world available to the public.
Rhode Island Beach Dynamics Over Decades compiles data collected since 1962 by roughly four dozen students and several scientists from URI’s Graduate School of Oceanography, Environmental Data Center and Department of Geosciences, along with Eastern Connecticut State University. Eight beaches are covered, from Misquamicut to South Kingstown.
The site took a year and a half to build and was funded by a grant from the state’s Executive Climate Change Coordinating Council.
“The profiles demonstrate how the beach is alive — growing, shrinking, and changing as seawater and sedimentation reshape it,” said J.P. Walsh, a URI professor of oceanography who has supervised the survey since 2020. “Like snowflakes, beaches never look the same again, and it’s important for communities to appreciate and plan for these transformations.”
Surveyors create a beach profile by measuring elevation points from the waterline to the vegetation line, then plotting them to show the beach’s shape at a moment in time. Repeating that over decades reveals how much sand a beach has gained or lost. For most of the survey’s history the work was done with a tripod-mounted level and a stadia rod; around 2023 crews switched to satellite-based GPS.
One section of the site is devoted to storms. It shows, beach by beach, what Hurricane Sandy did in 2012 — a storm that didn’t hit Rhode Island directly but pushed water and waves high enough to reshape dunes.
Mary Klimasewiski, a marine research associate who earned a master’s in data science at URI last year, built the site’s visualizations with Walsh.
See the data here.
