Web Tools

The U.S. Geological Survey WaterAlert service provides notifications to your email or phone for changes in water conditions based on thresholds you choose.

Many USGS water-resource monitoring sites have webcams installed to allow remote visibility of current water and environmental conditions, identify technical issues, verify remote measurements, and gather data for visual analyses. The Hydrologic Imagery Visualization and Information System (HIVIS) provides access to still-frame images and timelapse videos from our active webcams.

The Arctic Rivers Project will weave together Indigenous knowledges, monitoring, and the modeling of climate, rivers (flows, temperature, ice), and fish to improve understanding of how Arctic rivers, ice transportation corridors, fish, and communities might be impacted by and adapt to climate change.

The U.S. Groundwater Conditions animated data visualization depicts groundwater levels at 2,281 well sites across the U.S. At each site, groundwater levels are shown relative to the historic record (using percentiles), indicating where groundwater is comparatively high or low to what has been observed in the past. The corresponding time series chart shows the percent of sites in each water-le

The National Water Dashboard (NWD) is a mobile, interactive tool that provides real-time information on water levels, weather, and flood forecasts - all in one place on a computer, smartphone, or other mobile device. The NWD presents real-time stream, lake and reservoir, precipitation, and groundwater data from more than 13,500 USGS observation stations across the country.

Neural networks are powerful deep learning models that help us make accurate environmental predictions. This data visualization describes how to train an artificial neural network, and how the USGS uses them to make physically-realistic predictions with less data.

The U.S. is sub-divided into successively smaller hydrologic units which are classified into four levels: regions, sub-regions, accounting units, and cataloging units. Each unit is identified by a unique hydrologic unit code (HUC) consisting of two to eight digits based on its classification. This site provides information and data for current and historical hydrologic units, names, and numbers.

During major storms or other short-term events, the USGS collects streamflow and additional data (including storm tide, wave height, high-water marks, and additional sensor deployments) to aid in documenting flood events. The USGS Flood Event Viewer provides convenient, map-based access to downloadable event-based data.

This mapper identifies USGS Federal Priority Streamgages (FPS). FPS are monitoring stations that track the amount of water in streams and rivers across the Nation to meet long-term federal information needs. They are strategically positioned to serve as a backbone for the larger National Streamflow Network that is operated in cooperation with over 1,200 federal, state, tribal, and local agencies.

A majority of the water in the western U.S. comes from snowmelt, but changes in the timing, magnitude, and duration of snowmelt can alter water availability downstream. This data visualization story explores what changing snowmelt means for water in the West, and how new USGS efforts can advance snow science by modeling snowpack and snowmelt dynamics and linking these results to streamflow.

Water quality is essential for understanding water availability by providing insights into the drivers of change and possible availability constraints. Using data from eight monitoring organizations including the USGS, the Multisource Water-Quality Trends in the Delaware River Basin mapper shows changing water-quality trends from 2008-2018 in rivers and streams across the Delaware River Basin.

Since 1969, USGS has collected water-quality data along the deep-channel longitudinal axis of the San Francisco Bay-Delta system at 37 fixed locations spaced 3-6 kilometers apart. The Water Quality of San Francisco Bay Data Query provides access to the entire dataset.