Can Drones Measure Shoreline Erosion After Storms?

Yes, comparing LiDAR terrain surveys captured before and after a storm event gives a precise, quantified measurement of shoreline erosion, rather than a general visual impression of change. Because LiDAR measures actual 3D geometry, the comparison between two surveys shows exactly where the shoreline moved and by how much, which is a meaningfully different level of detail than photos taken before and after.

How Drone Shoreline Erosion Measurement Works

A drone flies the shoreline capturing a dense LiDAR point cloud of the terrain, which gets processed into a precise elevation and position model. When a second survey is flown after a storm event, the two models can be directly compared to calculate the actual change in shoreline position, beach volume, and dune or bank elevation. This turns "the shoreline looks different" into a specific, measured dataset, how many meters the shoreline retreated, how much material was lost from a given section, where the change was most severe.

Why It Matters

Post-storm shoreline change has real consequences for coastal infrastructure, property, and planning decisions, and having a precise, documented measurement rather than a general visual assessment matters for several audiences at once: port and coastal authorities prioritizing repair and reinforcement work, insurers documenting storm-related property impact, and planners tracking long-term erosion trends across a coastline. A quantified before-and-after comparison supports all of those decisions more directly than photographs alone.

Limitations

Tide timing affects the shoreline reference point in any given survey, so surveys should be planned around comparable tide conditions for the comparison to be meaningful. This method measures the above-water shoreline and terrain, it doesn't measure underwater bathymetric change, which requires separate sonar-based survey methods. And the accuracy of the comparison depends on how the original survey was flown just as much as the follow-up survey; a rushed or poorly controlled baseline survey limits how precisely later change can be measured against it.