Images

Image for the USGS Colorado River Basin Actionable and Strategic Integrated Science and Technology (ASIST) Initiative, geonarrative about the intersection of water use for copper mining and historic drought in the Lower Colorado River Basin (primarily Arizona), April 7, 2026.

Dr. Lisa Davis, Associate Professor in the University of Alabama Department of Geography and the Environment, discussing future collaborative research opportunities at the HIF test basin wave generator with the HIF R&D Technical Director.

River DroughtCast is a new machine learning system that predicts streamflow droughts — specifically “streamflow” droughts when rivers and streams drop to unusually low levels— up to 90 days in advance. Each prediction comes with uncertainty information to help users understand the confidence level of the forecast.

Diagram of a typical streamgage installation with equipment used to measure stream stage

Diagram of how USGS water data are transferred from streamgage to the internet 

River DroughtCast delivers current streamflow drought conditions and weekly forecasts of streamflow drought at select streamgages with long-term, complete records across the lower 48 states (the conterminous U.S., or CONUS).

Aerial view of Chattahoochee River in Harris County, Georgia.

Snapshot of modeled stream temperature data from across the lower 48 United States on May 25, 2020. Data from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2025.106655

Oklahoma-Texas Water Science Center Hydrologic Technician Dwight Sparks purges a monitoring well in Austin Texas to ensure stable field parameters before collecting a groundwater sample.

Oklahoma-Texas Water Science Center Hydrologic Technician Sam Matschek processes a groundwater sample at a monitoring well in Austin Texas. This groundwater sampling effort was to quantify geogenic contaminations in groundwater aquifers.

USGS scientist takes measurements of groundwater quality from a monitoring well near Zimmerman, Minnesota.

Screenshot of the Water Data for the Nation (WDFN) homepage. WDFN is the home for USGS's modernization of public delivery of water data. USGS water data can be accessed in many ways:

Screenshot of the National Water Dashboard showing USGS streamgages experiencing

A hydrographer providing a written description of a flagged high-water mark using a white board. 

U.S. River Conditions, October to December 2025 thumbnail image. The river conditions shown range from the driest condition seen at a gage (red open circles) to the wettest (blue closed circles). A purple outer ring around a gage indicates it is flooding

A USGS scientist from Selenium Research Laboratory collecting samples on the Kootenai River during field work in 2025.

USGS scientists processing samples taken from the Kootenai River during field work in 2025.

CPWSC staff testing new soil coring equipment for in-season soil sampling.

Images representing three of the services available to users of the National Water Availability Assessments (NWAA) Data Companion. Services include subset and download tool, data file directory, and web services. 

Infographic that describes the scientific process by following a social scientist and a physical scientist. 

The surface water supply and use index (SUI) expresses the fraction of the median long-term water supply at a HUC12 that is unavailable either because of climatic variability (e.g. an unusually dry year) or because the water is used consumptively for crop irrigation, thermoelectric power, or public supply.