USGS Water Levels & Gauges — New API, Daily Values
Pricing
$3.00 / 1,000 results
River and lake water levels, gauge heights, and streamflow for any US state or gauge list — daily values with recent history, freshness status, and validation — from the NEW official USGS Water Data API (the legacy API every other water actor uses shuts down in early 2027).
US states to pull gauges for — 2-letter codes (TX) or full names (Texas) both work. A state query returns every gauge with a reading in the last 21 days for the chosen parameters, up to the site limit below. Leave empty if you're using specific site ids instead.
[ "Texas"]USGS site numbers, e.g. 08158000 or USGS-08158000 (find them on any waterdata.usgs.gov gauge page). These are returned even if stale — the freshness field tells the truth. Combines with states.
[]Which measurements to return, one record per gauge per measurement. Gage height is the river water level; lake/reservoir elevation is the pool level above a datum; streamflow is discharge in cubic feet per second.
[ "Gage height", "Lake or reservoir elevation"]How many days of daily values to include per gauge (when the history series is on). Longer windows make runs slower.
Attach the daily values for the history window to each record (validated and glitch-filtered). Turn off for a fast latest-reading-only run — that mode needs only a handful of API calls per state.
Stop after this many distinct gauge sites across the whole run. Big states have many hundreds of active gauges (Texas alone has ~600 gage-height sites); the default is kept moderate because the USGS API rate-limits by volume — raise it freely for occasional runs.