Service Highlights

USGS Instantaneous Values Web Service

Need current data? Try this service! Retrieve current streamflow and other real-time data for one or multiple sites, using sets of flexible, predefined filters, since October 1, 2007. Data are available in WaterML , JSON and in a tab-delimited format with more formats, like Microsoft Excel, to come. Learn more about the web service or test the web service.

USGS Site Service

Need USGS water site data? A rich new site service is now available as a production service. The service allows searches for USGS sites and site information using a variety of flexible filters. A test tool is also available. Output formats include tab-delimited and KML formats (used with Google Earth and Google Maps). Geography Markup Language (GML) is planned for a future release.

USGS Daily Values Service

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

USGS Water Quality Web Services

The USGS and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) each collect vast amounts of water quality data. A jointly developed web service allows you to retrieve data for millions of quality checked water quality samples and results. Find out more at the Water Quality Web Services web site .

USGS Groundwater Levels Web Service

Use this service to retrieve historical manually-recorded groundwater levels from hydrologic sites served by the USGS. (If you are looking to retrieve data for real-time or historical groundwater levels recorded on a regular basis using automated equipment, please use the instantaneous values web service.)

Product Showcase

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Water Service Shortcuts

› Instantaneous Values Service for real-time data and historical data since October 1, 2007
› Site Service
› Daily Values Service
› Groundwater Levels Service
› Water Quality Service
› Frequently Asked Questions
› Writing Fault-Resistent Code

Service Example

This example uses a USGS water web service, as well as AJAX , JSON and jQuery Web 2.0 technologies.

USGS Site No. Find sites

Tips

Join the USGS Water Data Notification Service

While all USGS water web services strive to be highly available and accurate, there may be occasional system issues that may impact one or more services. In addition, older versions of the service may be replaced with newer versions, possibly impacting your usage. To stay informed, you are advised to join the USGS Water Data for the Nation Notification List . We won't spam you and you should receive relatively few but important emails of significant system events, upgrades or new web services.

Writing Fault Resistant Applications with USGS Water Data

Developers can usually quickly create a program to retrieve and process data using these web services. Writing programs that are unlikely to break if the service changes may require adopting some of USGS suggested best practices. If you are a software developer, please read our writing fault-resistent code page before creating a program. And thanks.