coast-documentation.md

Coastlines (coast)

Metadata

Property	Value
Dataset Code	coast
Dataset Title	Coastlines
Institution(s)	US Census Bureau
Date Accessed	2025-06-12
Update Frequency	Annually
Native Geospatial Resolution	custom
SAWS Geospatial Resolutions	custom
Time Horizon
Source Link	https://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/geo/shapefiles/index.php
Download Link	https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2024/COASTLINE/tl_2024_us_coastline.zip
Citation	U.S. Census Bureau, "tl_2024_us_coastline", TIGER/Line Shapefiles, 2024, https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2024/COASTLINE/.

Original Variables

Column Name	Description	Scale	Units
NAME	name of coastline	-	-

SAWS Variables

Attributes

Name	Code	Description	Scale	Units	Applicable Parameters
Coastline Name	popup_name	name of coastline	-	-	all

Parameters

None

Processing Steps

We have retrieved geometry data for the coastlines of the United States from the US Census Bureau TIGER/Line shapefiles for 2024. Here, we filter the original shapefile to only include seawater coastlines of the mainland US. Because the output file is quite large and contains an unnecessary level of detail, we also provide a simplified data file overlay-coast-simplified.geojson that has been simplified in GeoPandas using a 1000 m tolerance. This file is intended for use in web applications and other visualizations where a high level of detail is not required, but is used in any downstream calculations (e.g. in generating the coastprox dataset).