Release Notes for late February and early March 2020

A summary of new features and tools released in late February and early March, 2020

What have we been up to?

• Added handles to brush on the monitoring location page hydrograph
• State of hydrograph saved for bookmarking/linking
• Display upstream basin from NLDI for each monitoring location
• A number of additional graph server parameters
• New data services for monitoring locations

Brush handles added to monitoring location page hydrograph

Based on user feedback, the team upgraded the brush and zoom capability on the hydrograph by adding handles, making it more apparent that the zoom functionality is available and making it easier to use. The handles are also big enough for use on mobile devices.

State of hydrograph saved for bookmarking/linking

WDFN serves a huge range of users. WDFN users are now able to bookmark and share a hydrograph in the way that they requested it. After adjusting a hydrograph with custom date ranges and parameters, a person can copy a link from the address bar, paste it into another browser, and it will populate with a similar set of things. Users can share custom hydrographs generated with specific time-series statistics, parameter codes, dates, and compare settings. For example, a user may be interested in the changes in gage height at the USGS gage Colorado River at Lee’s Ferry, AZ over the course of the November 2012 Glen Canyon Dam High Flow Experimental Release. After choosing a custom time range and the gage height parameter, the URL in the browser can be used to share or return to the same settings.

Use NLDI to display upstream basin from each monitoring location

By utilizing the Hydro Network-Linked Data Index (NLDI), monitoring locations are able to be put in context of a catchment or basin. Each active stream site has an upstream basin in NLDI, as you can see here:

https://labs.waterdata.usgs.gov/api/nldi/linked-data/nwissite/USGS-05429700/basin/

A user who is interested in knowing the upstream basin for a site is can now see it on a monitoring location page map. Showing the upstream basin allows users to better understand if the contributing basin for a monitoring location is large or small, or if downstream locations would be affected by a spill or hazard, among various applications. There are already upstream and downstream NLDI calls in on the monitoring location pages.

New parameters for the graph-images service

One of the most common requests that we get in feedback is that users want to be able to download an image of the hydrograph. We started on this work with the graph image API, but it only allowed a single parameter, the parameter code.

Now, the image server supports several additional parameters.

• Title- allows a title to be placed on the top of the graph describing its location: https://labs.waterdata.usgs.gov/api/graph-images/monitoring-location/09380000/?parameterCode=00060&title=true

• Width- allows the width of the image to be varied from 300 to 1200 pixels. This also improves the readability of the graph when the image is small.

• Period- previously, the only option for number of days was the most recent 7 days. Now a user can input an arbitrary number of days: https://labs.waterdata.usgs.gov/api/graph-images/monitoring-location/09380000/?parameterCode=00060&title=true&period=p120D

• Time ranges- now that users can request a custom time range on the monitoring location page, and they can also request that same time range on the graph server: https://labs.waterdata.usgs.gov/api/graph-images/monitoring-location/09380000/?parameterCode=00060&title=true&startDT=2019-10-01&endDT=2020-01-10

Additional features that we are planning to add to the graph server include

• Adding the ability to request a specific time series, like you can with the monitoring location pages

• Documenting the API using the OpenAPI standard

• Updating the date queries to meet international standards

New features and tools

• We’ve have taken a first step toward completely reconfiguring how we pull data on the backend, as evidenced by showing the new groundwater daily value graph on the development site. This will be pushed to production soon!

• All of the Groundwater Watch networks have been populated in a service, a big step forward on our new networks service: https://labs.waterdata.usgs.gov/api/observations/collections?f=json

What is coming up for next sprint?

• waterdata.usgs.gov/networks – page will show a list of all networks with links to specific network pages

• Presenting statistical information in a standards-driven format

• Allowing networks to be populated by a CSV

• Displaying additional network metadata on network pages

Disclaimer

Any use of trade, firm, or product names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Government.