Water Data Visualizations Team

This diagram, released in English and Spanish in 2022, depicts the global water cycle. It shows how human water use affects where water is stored, how it moves, and how clean it is. This diagram is also available in other languages available on our Downloadable Products page.

https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/science/shuixunhuan-water-cycle-chinese-simplified.

A split-panel map of Salt Lake City, Utah, highlighting the Great Salt Lake, shows 2006 Landsat imagery on the left side panel and 2006 NLCD, with colorized legend of land use classes, on the right. The animation displays a slider being used to switch between the two different datasets, revealing the land cover classes shown in Landsat imagery.

Stacked bar chart of 1990-2019 agriculture, domestic, and industry freshwater withdrawals in the U.S., estimated by the World Bank. In all years, industry withdraws the most freshwater, followed by agriculture and domestic. From 2006 to 2010, industrial water dropped 5,000 cubic kilometers, then remained low.

Animation of five satellite images of the Tanana River in Alaska. The imagery is colored in shades of blue to show the degree of confidence that water is present. Two scatter plots show positive pairwise relationships between satellite river elevation and satellite river width and satellite streamflow.

Six lollipop charts highlight deviations in maximum percent ice cover on the five Great Lakes (Lake Michigan, Lake Erie, Lake Superior, Lake Huron, and Lake Ontario) from 1973-2023. The difference in lake ice cover is shown for each lake and across the entire system compared to the 50-year mean (1973-2023).

A tile map of the U.S. with lollipop charts for each state that show differences in forest area magnitude, in squared kilometers, from the 35-year mean (1985-2020) across the contiguous United States (CONUS). Positive differences are shown in forest green lollipops and negative differences are shown in burnt orange lollipops.

Circular calendar charts showing the projected effects of climate change on the onset and end of spawning for the American Shad and the Striped Bass in the Hudson River Estuary, during two modeling periods: 1950 to 2012 and 2012 to 2099.

Circular calendar charts showing the projected effects of climate change on the onset and end of spawning for the American Shad and the Striped Bass in the Hudson River Estuary, during two modeling periods: 1950 to 2012 and 2012 to 2099.

The loss of the North American grassland biome. Once spanning more than 2 million square kilometers, we have lost over half of the world’s most imperiled ecosystem: the temperate grasslands. A map of North America shows the loss of the grassland biome from Canada to Mexico, largely contained within the central plains of North America.

A tile map of the U.S. with alluvial charts for each state and the nation that show changes in the total volume of water use from 1985-2015 across eight categories (thermoelectric, irrigation, public supply, industrial, aquaculture, mining, domestic, and livestock).

Step chart timeseries of U.S. electricity generation (in gigawatt hours) across five classes of renewable energy, from 2000 to 2020. As of 2020, these classes ranked (from high to low): wind, hydropower, solar, bioenergy, and geothermal. From 2000 to 2020, wind power generation steadily grew from roughly 10,000 to over 325,000 gigawatt hours.

A tile map of the U.S. showing mean daily stream temperature for the 5 USGS stream sites with the longest daily temperature records in each U.S. state. The oldest site, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, began collecting data in October 1964.