These data provide available contemporary high-resolution national shoreline. The Continually Updated Shoreline Product is provided via the National Shoreline Data Explorer application. Shoreline is a foundation data layer that may be used for mapping and charting applications, developing models for tsunamis, storm surge, and coastal flooding as well as predicting sea level change and forecasting pollution trajectories. It can assist decision-makers in developing comprehensive coastal-ready community plans, managing coastal resources, delineating and mitigating hazard events, making projections for wave and wind energy utilization, conducting environmental analyses and monitoring, and more. These data should be used for planning purposes only; please see the NOAA-imposed Use Constraints in the full metadata record. This shoreline product should provide users with an more accurate representation of current ground conditions in Rhode Island. When the CUSP coastline was compared with both the Shoreline and Islands (1989) dataset and the Coastal Waters (1983) dataset currently available from RIGIS, significant differences were noticed.
