GSDA:Obtaining Stream Stage Data from the USGS NWISWeb

From XMS Wiki - http://wikis.aquaveo.com/xms/

NWISWeb provides historical, recent, and real-time data. The real-time portion of the site is very closely related to the USGS WaterWatch website, where users can click on a US map begin the data retrieval process.

NWISWeb offers an immense quantity of data. Streamflow data is offered in three categories: Real-Time, Recent (Daily), and Streamflow (daily data for the site's period of record, termed "historical" in this page). This page shows how to obtain historical Streamflow data from the NWIS. Take a look at the following table to get a idea of some of the basic differences in each data catergory:

To obtain data, go to the USGS NWISWeb site at http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis. If you have trouble getting there, follow the bulleted steps below:

• Go to the USGS home page at www.usgs.gov.
• Click on the Water button near the top.
• Click on the NWISWeb link located in the green table on the right-hand side of the page.

The following instructions describe how to obtain historical streamflow data from NWISWeb:

1. Click the Surface Water button.
2. Click the Streamflow button.
3. Place a check in the boxes of the site selection criteria you wish to use.

   If you don't know many details about the site, try a search based on State and Site Name.

4. Click the Submit button.
5. Under the Select Sites heading, enter your site selection criteria.
6. Under the Choose Output Format heading, select the "Table of sites sorted by" option (this is the default).
7. Select "Site Name" from the sorted by: list and "County" from the grouped by: list.

   These options were chosen for this illustration, but the other options can be useful as well.

8. Click the Submit button at the page's bottom.
9. Select a link for the site of interest.
10. Enter the desired time interval in the retrieve data from: fields.

    Note: Refer to the Period of Record dates in selecting the time interval.

11. Choose an output option, either Graphs of data or Tab-Separated Data.

    If you choose to display a graph, the data will be displayed graphically in the browser;

    If you choose to retrieve tab-separated data, you can further choose to save the data to a file, save it to a compressed file, or display it in the browser.

Figure 1: A Sample Daily Streamflow Graph from USGS' NWISWeb.