Coastal storms and shoreline change: Signal or noise?

A linear regression (studentized) residual analysis was used to identify po tential shoreline position outliers and to investigate the effect of the ou tliers on shoreline rate-of-change values for transects along the Outer Ban ks, North Carolina. Results from this analysis showed that, over a 134 year period, storm-influenced data contribute statistically significant informa tion to the long-term signal. Consequently, storm-influenced data points do not appear to be temporal outliers and thus, do not need to be excluded fr om a long-term analysis of shoreline changes. Furthermore, projections of t he upper and lower confidence intervals (CIs) for the regression line to th e year 2010 (24 year extrapolation) showed that including or excluding outl iers had minimal effects on shoreline position predictions.