Additional field measurements are coming to WDFN
Manual readings for additional water data parameters will be available beginning July 1st, 2026.
Water Data for the Nation (WDFN) publishes multiple categories of data collected at our monitoring locations, including both data collected by automated sensors and through manual methods. Manually collected data, which we refer to as “field measurements,” are collected during visits to a monitoring location.
Historically, WDFN (like NWISWeb before it) has published two categories of field measurement data: paired measurements of discharge and gage height (parameter codes 00060 and 00065, respectively) used to construct rating curves, and reference readings of groundwater levels (parameter codes 72019, 62610, and 62611) used primarily to calibrate automated sensors.
Beginning July 1st, WDFN will start publishing these reference readings for all parameter codes. This means that field measurement data will be available for the first time for new parameters, such as reservoir elevation, water temperature, and more. It also means that reference readings for discharge and gage height, used to calibrate automated sensors, will be available through WDFN alongside the current paired measurements used for rating curve construction. All previously available field measurements data will continue to be published.
These new field measurements will start appearing across WDFN pages, where they’ll be available for display on Monitoring Location Pages , My Favorites lists, and will be available for searches on the Explore USGS Water Data tool.
New field measurement series, like readings of air and water temperature, will display on Monitoring Location Pages alongside the already available discharge, gage height, and groundwater level series.
To help users distinguish the already available paired measurements of discharge and gage height used for rating curve creation from the potentially unpaired reference readings used to calibrate sensors, we’ve added a new “reading_type” field to data downloads from monitoring location pages, our Consolidated Download form
, and our field measurements
and field measurement metadata
API endpoints. This new reading_type field will have a value of ReferencePrimary for these new reference readings, while paired measurements will have values of Discharge and MeanGageHeight instead.
Newly collected field measurements will appear on WDFN beginning on July 1st, and historical readings will gradually be backfilled over the month of July. Please reach out to us wdfn@usgs.gov with any questions or feedback you may have.
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