Reference · built on requestCommons signalAir, water & environment

USGS Water Services

Instantaneous, daily, statistical, site, and groundwater data for US streams, lakes, and wells from USGS Water Services REST endpoints.

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About

USGS Water Services publishes the National Water Information System over REST. The Instantaneous Values service returns near-real-time readings, usually taken every 15 minutes and transmitted hourly. The Daily Values service returns daily mean, maximum, and minimum. The Statistics service returns daily, monthly, and annual statistics on approved data. The Site service holds metadata on millions of locations where water data has been collected, and the Groundwater Levels service returns manually recorded well levels. Output is WaterML 1.1, JSON, or the USGS RDB tab-delimited format, keyed by five-character parameter codes such as 00060 for discharge and 00065 for gage height. USGS has announced that WaterServices will be decommissioned in the first quarter of 2027 in favor of the APIs at api.waterdata.usgs.gov.

Through Fibric, an operator watches the gauges near your sites and routes and proposes holds, notices, or work orders when a reading crosses the threshold you set.

This is a reference listing. It documents what Fibric would read from USGS Water Services and what it could propose, based on the publisher's published interfaces. Fibric builds it under a managed deployment when you request it; selecting it here installs nothing.

Inputs

  • Instantaneous values from /nwis/iv/ for up to 100 sites per request, filtered by parameterCd, period, or startDT and endDT
  • Daily values from /nwis/dv/ with statCd 00003 mean, 00001 maximum, and 00002 minimum
  • Daily, monthly, and annual statistics from /nwis/stats/ on approved data only, tab-delimited, for up to ten sites
  • Site metadata from /nwis/site/ by state, county, hydrologic unit, or bounding box, as RDB or KML
  • Manually recorded groundwater levels from /nwis/gwlevels, with well depth, aquifer, and altitude filters
  • Changed records only, through the modifiedSince argument, so a poll returns what moved since the last one

Proposed actions

Read-only. This feed informs operators; it changes nothing.

Proposed actions are target capabilities. Every action runs propose-first and needs a validated deployment and the appropriate permissions.

What you can build

  • Hold deliveries when a crossing floods

    Gage height at the gauges on your delivery routes is checked each hour. When a reading passes the level you set, the operator proposes holding the stops beyond it and drafts the customer message.

    With Weather Hold

  • Stage a site before the river rises

    For each property near a gauge, the operator reads discharge and gage height and proposes sandbags, pump checks, and a closure list when the trend crosses your threshold.

    With Storm Prep

  • Warn staff about rising water

    The operator turns a gauge reading over your threshold into a draft notice for the sites downstream, with the site number and reading time, ready for you to send.

    With Severe Weather Notice

  • Plan a shutdown around low water

    When a well level or intake discharge falls below the value in your permit, the operator drafts the shutdown notice and the record of the readings behind it.

    With Shutdown Notice

Requirements

  • One major filter per request: sites, stateCd, huc, bBox, or countyCd; a bounding box's latitude by longitude product may not exceed 25 degrees
  • USGS site numbers and five-character parameter codes for the series you watch
  • A client that follows HTTP 301 redirects and sends Accept-Encoding: gzip for large pulls
  • A migration path to api.waterdata.usgs.gov before the first quarter of 2027
Authentication
None. The services are URL accessible and can be run from a browser, in USGS's words; no key or account is involved.

Limits

  • USGS plans to decommission WaterServices in the first quarter of 2027 and may begin intentional degradation after August 2026
  • Instantaneous values go back to October 1, 2007; some operational data such as temperature and precipitation is limited to 120 days
  • Most recent readings are provisional and can change; statistics exclude roughly the last year until data is approved
  • USGS asks for at most 5 to 10 small requests per second and blocks IPs whose use seriously impacts others, returning 403

Access and pricing

Reference listing. Public feed access is separate from Fibric integration. If you request this feed, your quote covers the build, usage, and support.

Request USGS Water Services ↗

Questions and answers

How current are instantaneous values?
Readings are usually made every 15 minutes and transmitted hourly. USGS asks that you not fetch the same data more than hourly and that you poll for new or changed data with modifiedSince rather than re-pull whole series.
Which output formats are available?
The instantaneous and daily services return WaterML 1.1 by default, WaterML 2.0, JSON, and RDB. The Site service returns RDB, KML for Google Earth and Google Maps, and the USGS mapper XML. The Statistics service is tab-delimited only.
Is this service going away?
Yes. USGS states WaterServices will be decommissioned in the first quarter of 2027, with no intentional degradation before August 2026. Replacements are at api.waterdata.usgs.gov/ogcapi/, with a migration guide for the R dataRetrieval and Python dataretrieval packages.
Ask about USGS Water Services

Ask about the capabilities and requirements in this listing.

For project-specific requirements, contact Fibric.

This Commons signal listing is developed, published, and supported by Fibric. It reads public data published by U.S. Geological Survey Water Services (waterservices.usgs.gov). Upstream agencies and projects are the property of their respective owners, who are not affiliated with Fibric and do not sponsor or endorse this listing. Trademark policy