Water Data waterdata.dev

waterdata.dev

Water Data

Daily streamflow at every active US stream gage, and drought by county.

Daily mean flow for the last 400 days at every active USGS stream gage, with approval and ice flags, plus weekly US Drought Monitor categories for every county. Built on the new USGS Water Data APIs: a stable replacement for scripts that used the legacy WaterServices API.

Browse the datasets Read the docs

What you get

  • Plain files over HTTPS

    Each series for each place as a small JSON or CSV file; tables as JSON or CSV, one file per partition, plus every dataset as one CSV or Parquet file. No key or signup.

  • Versions you can cite

    Every update gets a version id, and a pinned URL always returns the same data. The first version of each month is kept for good, so results stay reproducible.

  • Checked before publishing

    Each update is validated against its contract. If a check fails, the last good version stays live.

  • Licenses up front

    Every dataset names its source, its license, the exact credit line and whether commercial use is allowed.

Datasets

All 3 datasets

  • County drought categories

    Weekly percent of each US county's area in each US Drought Monitor category over the last 400 days: none, D0 abnormally dry, D1 moderate, D2 severe, D3 extreme and D4 exceptional drought. The categories don't overlap and add up to 100.

    Time series Weekly

  • USGS stream gages

    Every USGS stream gage (streams, canals, ditches and tidal streams) that reported a daily mean discharge in the last 400 days: name, state, county, hydrologic unit, coordinates, drainage area and period of daily record. These are the gages in streamflow-daily, under the same ids.

    Table Daily

  • Daily streamflow

    Daily mean discharge at every USGS stream gage over the last 400 days, flagged provisional, estimated or ice-affected, with the USGS qualifier codes. Re-read in full every day, because USGS revises provisional values for months.

    Time series Daily

Quickstart

Three requests: the catalog, one dataset's metadata and one data file.

curl -s "https://api.waterdata.dev/v1/catalog"
curl -s "https://api.waterdata.dev/v1/drought-county"
curl -s "https://api.waterdata.dev/v1/drought-county/area/us-county-06037.csv"

Base URL: https://api.waterdata.dev. Next: the docs and the API reference.