USGS Water Data APIs

Interested in historical summarized daily data about our nation's streams, lakes and wells? This API provides a wealth of historical water data. Daily data is available for USGS water sites include mean, median, maximum, minimum, and/or other derived values.

Location information is basic information about the monitoring location including the name, identifier, agency responsible for data collection, and the date the location was established. It also includes information about the type of location, such as stream, lake, or groundwater, and geographic information about the location, such as state, county, latitude and longitude, and hydrologic unit code (HUC).

Daily data and continuous measurements are grouped into time series, which represent a collection of observations of a single parameter, potentially aggregated using a standard statistic, at a single monitoring location. This endpoint provides metadata about those time series, including their operational thresholds, units of measurement, and when the earliest and most recent observations in a time series occurred.

The USGS and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) each collect vast amounts of water quality data. The Water Quality Portal provides publicly available discrete water-quality data from the USGS, EPA, and over 400 state, federal, tribal, and local agencies in Water Quality Exchange (WQX) 3 formats, while the USGS Samples API provides direct API access to USGS discrete water quality observations.

USGS offers Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) compliant APIs, which will let you download continuous service measurements, discrete field measurements, metadata about monitoring locations, and more.

The Real-Time Flood Impact (RTFI) API exposes the locations, called Flood Impact Locations, where the USGS measured the height of critical safety or infrastructure that may be vulnerable to flooding. Examples of Flood Impact Locations include embankments, roads and bridges, pedestrian paths, and buildings. Flood Impact Locations are surveyed and associated with a nearby USGS real-time streamgage.

The National Imagery Management System (NIMS) is a comprehensive infrastructure designed to collect, store, process, and deliver imagery collected by cameras managed by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) for public and scientific use. NIMS supports a wide range of hydrologic and environmental monitoring applications.