North Carolina

North Carolina runs the long Atlantic-facing barrier-island coast from the Virginia line at False Cape past Nags Head, Rodanthe, Avon, and Cape Hatteras through Ocracoke and the Crystal Coast around Cape Lookout to the Wilmington area and the South Carolina border at the Cape Fear River mouth. The Outer Banks are the long ribbon of sandy barrier islands that separates the open Atlantic from the shallow Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds — a geography that produces some of the most distinctive coastal-storm history in the United States. The tide signature here is a moderate semidiurnal signal that the open-Atlantic exposure delivers cleanly to the ocean side: mean range at the USCG Cape Hatteras gauge is about 1.0 metre, with two highs and two lows of comparable size about twelve and a half hours apart. Spring tides push close to 1.4 metres and neaps drop near 0.5. Pamlico Sound on the inland side runs a much smaller wind-tide signal where the lunar phase barely registers and the wind direction over a 50-kilometre fetch dominates water-level variation by 30 to 60 centimetres on sustained events. The defining historical feature is the Diamond Shoals and the Graveyard of the Atlantic — more than 2,000 documented shipwrecks since the seventeenth century, the federal Life-Saving Service stations built through the 1870s and 1880s, and the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse moved 880 metres inland in 1999 to escape the eroding shoreline. Hurricane and nor'easter season can both stack water above predicted by a metre or more, with Hurricane Dorian in September 2019 cutting a new inlet through Ocracoke Island that the National Park Service eventually filled. Surf at Avon Pier and S-Turns Rodanthe, the Hatteras-Ocracoke ferry, the Cape Hatteras National Seashore beach-driving permits, and the Pamlico Sound flats fishing for redfish and speckled trout all read the table for different windows. NOAA CO-OPS runs the authoritative gauge network and harmonic predictions.