Water Data for the Nation 2023 through 2025

A look into the current and coming soon features available in WDFN. Updated in 2025 to highlight progress and include links to new features

What is Water Data for the Nation?

Water Data for the Nation (WDFN) is the home for USGS’s modernization of public delivery of water data. USGS water data can be accessed by the public in many ways:

• Webpages to view maps, graphs, and descriptions of water data
• Subscribe to email and text alerts of real-time water conditions
• Download all USGS water data through a variety of download options including programmer-friendly APIs

WDFN is experiencing a lot of growth with many new pages published in the last couple years. We want to tell our users what has become available to help our users discover useful new ways to interact with Water Data for the Nation.

WDFN’s web presence, or “ecosystem” has been separated into 4 categories to help us talk about the purpose of each page. Each category could see new pages in future years, and this diagram highlights our newest features.

Let’s walk through the different levels in WDFN and what features have been recently updated.

WDFN Home

WDFN Home serves users looking for water data most relevant to them. WDFN Home is a key entry point for discovering water data and exploring other pages.

We have published a new WDFN Home Page:

• WDFN Home Page : A new tool to help users who land on waterdata.usgs.gov to navigate to data that is most interesting to them. While legacy is still up, this page is expected to help point users to WDFN and legacy pages of interest. Learn more on our previous blog post

Exploratory Pages

USGS provides public access to a wide variety of data and adds value to those data by providing basic data visualizations, services to download data, descriptions of data and metadata, and supporting documentation. Due to the variety and depth of content offered, the WDFN team’s primary goal is to help users discover the USGS water data. Exploratory Pages are pages designed to help users explore our data. We will likely build more of these pages in coming years as we increasingly provide tools to access, visualize, and use water data.

We currently have two map-based exploration tools:

• National Water Dashboard : Allows users to explore the latest water data, using a map with many available map layers including weather and flood forecasts. National trends are easy to understand at a glance based on colors tracking the latest values against historical averages. This tool is available in English and Spanish.
• Explore USGS Water Data : A new tool to explore USGS water data nationwide, finding locations of interest to access the water data. The Explore USGS Water Data page provides the ability to explore both current and historical water data that are available in WDFN. Future improvements of the page will allow searching by additional data collections and refining your search results to download data. Learn more about the features of this page on our previous blog post .

Network Pages

USGS has over 1.9 million monitoring locations which can be grouped in various ways; by geography, by funding networks, by water feature. Network Pages allow users to access links to multiple monitoring location data pages simultaneously. The focus was on customization to supplement the legacy offerings and learn more about what works for our users. We look forward to adding more functionality to these pages as they mature.

We currently have two types of network pages:

• State Pages: On the State Pages, users can explore what data types are collected at each location or see locations that collect data types of interest by filtering the map and list. Access the State Pages through WDFN Home . Read more about the page on our previous blog post .
• My Favorites : The My Favorites page allows users to create a custom list of monitoring locations that can be bookmarked and shared for repeated viewings of key locations. Read more about the features on our previous blog post . My Favorites is also the place where you can view any number of data graphs from all your favorite locations on a single page.

Specialty Pages

Our largest category of WDFN pages is the Specialty Pages. Each of these pages meets a unique need for accessing water data that serve distinct users. We include ways to view data, ways to download or get sent our data, as well as descriptions of data services available from USGS Water Mission Area.

We have 6 distinct Specialty Pages:

• Monitoring Location Page : All the information you need about any place we collect data. This page offers site metadata, such as location and funding information, and access to data summaries. This page also offers an interactive hydrograph that allows users to look at up to two types of data on one graph for a custom date period. Learn more about the Monitoringn Location Page modernization on our previous blog post
• Combined Location Graph : A new tool to look at data from multiple monitoring locations all in one image. Users specify the type of data they want to see and can compare it to that same data type at four other locations. Learn more on our previous blog post
• All graphs view of Monitoring Location Page : A new tool to see all the most recent data available for one monitoring location, displayed on a long-format webpage. This page allows users to look at all the data we’re monitoring with sensors, with each on its own graph so you can review the most recent conditions and status of a location at a glance without clicking. Read more on our previous blog post
• WaterAlert : Allows users to subscribe to alerts when water conditions change based on custom thresholds. Get notified with WaterAlert, a near-real time hydrologic alerting system that notifies you of stream, lake, and coastal conditions across the nation. Subscribe to text or email alerts when water conditions change. Read more on our previous blog post
• USGS Water Services : We recently updated the Water Services user interface, but are otherwise phasing out this main Water Services page. We are releasing new, modernized API endpoints throughout rest of 2025 which will provide the same data that you’re used to but with a new API interface and response format (see the next bullet)
• Refine Download/API Services : This is the new central hub for all modernized USGS water data APIs. There you will see links to a number of different endpoints, including for other USGS data like the National Imagery Management Service. You’ll also find a “documentation” tab which provides a central place for long-form API documentation. Finally, you’ll find a signup form for API keys. We’ll be updating this website to add more documentation and guides for using the new APIs. Read more about WDFN APIs in our previous blog post

What’s next?

Our team is busy working on the new tools and features for WDFN. As new features become available, a blog will be posted on the Water Data for the Nation Blog announcing key features. Informational banners will also announce the new features on WDFN pages with helpful links to where you can find them. Our team prioritizes upcoming work based on a mix of website analytics, user testing, and user feedback using our user-centered design processes . If you want to participate in our testing for WDFN, send an email to wdfn_usabilitytesting@usgs.gov with details on how you use USGS water data right now and how you are interested in participating.

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