USGS Water Services
› 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 
› Statistics Service
› Frequently Asked Questions
› Writing Fault-Resistent Code
This example uses a USGS water web service, as well as AJAX , JSON and jQuery Web 2.0 technologies.
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, please 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.
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.
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| USGS hydrologist at work |
This site serves USGS water data via automated means using web services and extensible markup language (XML) , as well as other popular media types. Services are invoked with the REST protocol. These services designed for high fault tolerance and very high availability.
Retrieve daily, monthly or annual statistics for sites. Statistics are provided on approved data only for time-series sites. Statistics are available for any parameter on these sites with approved data. This service is an initial beta release. A full version of the service is planned for release in the summer of 2014. Learn more and test the 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.
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.
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.
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 .
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.) Learn more and test the service.
