🌊 USGS Water Services Scraper

🚀 Export US hydrologic observations in seconds. Pull streamflow, gauge height, water temperature, dissolved oxygen, pH, and groundwater levels from the National Water Information System across ~10,000 monitoring sites. No API key, no registration, no manual CSV downloads.

The USGS Water Services Scraper exports observation records from the United States Geological Survey's National Water Information System (NWIS), the authoritative source for real-time and historical surface-water and groundwater data in the United States. Each record contains the site identifier, site name, geographic coordinates, parameter code, observed value, unit, qualifier flags, and the precise observation timestamp.

The catalog covers streamflow gauges on every major river system, lake and reservoir levels, water-quality monitors, and groundwater wells across all 50 states, plus territories. Pull the most-recent reading for live dashboards or a date-bounded window for trend analysis, flood-modeling, or environmental research. This Actor turns the underlying observation feed into clean CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML in under five minutes.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Hydrologists, civil engineers, environmental scientists, irrigation operators, flood-warning teams, GIS analysts, ag-tech and water-utility companies	Streamflow monitoring, flood and drought modeling, irrigation scheduling, water-quality compliance, reservoir operations, environmental research

📋 What the USGS Water Services Scraper does

Three endpoint modes in a single Actor:

• 💧 Instantaneous Values (iv). Sub-hourly readings from real-time surface-water gauges.
• 📅 Daily Values (dv). Daily mean / min / max statistics for long-term trend analysis.
• 🪨 Groundwater Levels (gwlevels). Discrete and continuous well-level measurements.

Filter by USGS site codes, parameter codes (00060 discharge, 00065 gauge height, 00010 water temperature, 00300 dissolved oxygen, 00400 pH, and dozens more), and an optional date range for historical exports.

Each record includes site metadata (code, name, state, coordinates, site type), parameter metadata (code, description, unit, statistic), the observed value, qualifier flags, agency code, and the precise observation timestamp.

💡 Why it matters: USGS NWIS is the canonical source for US streamflow and groundwater data, cited by NOAA forecasts, FEMA flood maps, state water boards, and academic hydrology. Building your own pipeline means handling WaterML and JSON variants, retry logic, and site-code lookups by hand. This Actor skips all of that.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: agencyCode, dateTime, endpoint, latitude, longitude, methodDescription, parameterCode, parameterDescription, parameterName, qualifiers, scrapedAt, siteCode, siteName, siteType, stateCode, statisticCode, unit, value. These field names come straight from the actor's dataset schema, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the USGS Water Services Scraper page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Pick endpoint (iv / dv / gwlevels), list site codes, optionally narrow by parameter codes and a date range.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor collect your data.
5. 📥 Download. Grab your results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

🔗 Recommended Actors

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more reference-data scrapers.

⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the US Geological Survey or the Department of the Interior. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available USGS data is collected.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

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