Essential Tools and Products

Data scientists in the USGS Water Resources Mission Area make sense of large environmental and operational datasets by applying various modeling, statistical, and visualization techniques to generate actionable information.

During large, short-term floods, the USGS collects additional data to help document these high-water events. This data is uploaded to the USGS Short-Term Network (STN) for long-term archival, and served out to the public through the USGS Flood Event Viewer (FEV) which provides convenient, map-based access to storm-surge and other event-based data.

The USGS Quality Systems Branch (QSB) represents the Water Resource Mission Area’s commitment to generating environmental data of known quality. QSB produces water and sediment performance-assessment samples and data to provide the USGS laboratory users, USGS laboratories, and field personnel with quantitative performance information to assess data quality.

USGS Cooperative Matching Funds (CMF) support joint projects with our state, regional, tribal, and local partners to provide reliable, impartial, and timely information needed to understand and manage the Nation's water resources.

The National Field Manual for the Collection of Water-Quality Data (NFM) provides documented methods and protocols for USGS field personnel who collect water-quality data. The NFM provides detailed, comprehensive, and citable procedures for sampling water resources, processing samples for analysis of water quality, measuring field parameters, and specialized procedures.

When planning for a flood, there are three key questions that must be answered: What areas will be flooded? How deep will the flood waters get? When will the flood arrive? Historical flooding can help a community anticipate how much impact similar flood events could have, but there are other methods and tools that can provide more accurate and nuanced estimations of a wide variety of flood...