The Observations API will be decommissioned October 19, 2026
Observations API Services on labs.waterdata.usgs.gov will be retired. Users should migrate to services on api.waterdata.usgs.gov instead.
The experimental Observations API (hosted at labs.waterdata.usgs.gov/api/observations/) was a service hosted on the labs.waterdata.usgs.gov domain, providing lists of related monitoring locations and subsets of data from the National Water Information System. After an evaluation period, we’ve decided that we will not be promoting this service to production status and will instead be decommissioning the service.
Beginning on October 19th, 2026, all requests to the Observations API will return a 301 redirect to this blog post. After February 1, 2027 these redirects will be removed and requests to this API will error.
This change only impacts the Observations API, at labs.waterdata.usgs.gov/api/observations/. This will not impact services hosted at waterdata.usgs.gov, waterservices.usgs.gov, or api.waterdata.usgs.gov.
Users are encouraged to migrate to the new USGS Water Data APIs, which implement the same interface as the Observations API, hosted at api.waterdata.usgs.gov/ogcapi/v1/.
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Background
For over 15 years, the USGS has provided machine-readable and automated access to water data via the WaterServices family of application programming interfaces (APIs), which are hosted at https://waterservices.usgs.gov/. These APIs underpin all other USGS web delivery products – including products such as the National Water Dashboard and Water Data for the Nation (WDFN) – and have been incredibly effective at delivering water data to the public. Between October 2024 and March 2025 alone, these legacy APIs have handled more than 1.6 billion requests from almost 3.5 million distinct IP addresses.