The U.S. Geological Survey monitors the waters
of the nation and presents
the results of that monitoring on monitoring location pages
showing real time water monitoring data and much more.
This is an overview of a monitoring location page.
Here you see one of those pages picked out of thousands.
Trout Creek near Tahoe Valley, California.
The main feature is the hydrograph.
One central, interactive hydrograph. By default,
you see the most recent seven days of water depth data.
You can interact with the hydrograph
by moving the mouse across it,
and as you move across it,
you can see the numeric value
change. You can zoom in and out - pan and scan.
If you're on a mobile device, you can interact
with this hydrograph by tapping the screen.
You can change the amount of data shown
on this hydrograph by clicking one of these buttons.
Here is a graph of one year of data.
Different colors are used
to explain qualifiers or caveats about the data.
All of the colors
are explained at the bottom of
the hydrograph in the legend.
Here is a graph of 30 days of data.
If you'd like a custom range of dates, you either
enter the number of days
here or the start and end dates here.
If you'd like to
download the data, that's 'retrieve data,' here.
The download format is easy
to import into spreadsheets and other applications.
So this is gage height.
It's the most common water data people like to see,
but USGS often monitors more than gage height.
Scroll down to data to graph.
Let's look at discharge
the volumetric stream flow at a location.
And so now here is 30 days of streamflow.
If you'd like context for these water data,
here are your options.
You can compare these data to what it was like a year ago.
Year-over-year comparison.
You can display median statistics to see
how these data compare to long term averages.
In this case, 60 years of monitoring data.
We think the hydrograph
is the most prominent and important feature of these
monitoring location pages, but there are other features.
There's a hydrograph data table. You can page
through the data in tabular format.
We're glad to present you this interactive map.
You see the current monitoring location
is a blue pin in the map
and you see other nearby active monitoring locations.
You can click on them to view their monitoring location pages.
There also are lines indicating the creek or river.
Where's the water coming from and where's it going to?
As you zoom out, you'll see the gray watershed area -
all the area where rain would fall, potentially
entering the stream and eventually passing
by the monitoring location.
Helpful spatial context.
Often several monitoring locations are networked together to
get a bigger picture
view of water resources in an area of the United States.
If this monitoring location belongs to one
or more networks,
you can click on them to see all associated monitoring.
If you'd like a bigger picture
of the types of data collected at this monitoring location,
more than just recent data or time series data,
the summary of all available data offers that.
For example, USGS monitored dissolved metals in the water
at this location from 1989 to 2002.
These data can be viewed and downloaded from here.
There is much more metadata about the
monitoring location, such
as its latitude and longitude and what county it's in.
Sometimes helpful background information
is written in this area about how USGS has performed,
monitoring here, the history of its monitoring and more.
Finally, at the bottom of the page, there is a clickable
list of cooperators.
Other agencies and programs
that help the USGS
monitor water at this monitoring location.
Let's return to the top of the page. If you need to get to our
old system, for now you can select classic page.
This will take you to those pages that
have looked about the same for over 20 years.
These pages won't be around
forever because we're building these new pages.
And there's a menu system
at the top where you can see
other kinds of water data
available at this monitoring location.
And there's much more written material
from our Water Data for the Nation blog
to educational material in our Water Science School.
We're always adding more
features. If you have feedback, please
click questions or comments
here at the bottom and let us know.
We'd like to hear from you.
Everything you just saw was focused on USGS
monitoring of a river.
But USGS also monitors groundwater wells
and much more. And those pages behave comparably.
This has been an overview of a new USGS
monitoring location page.
We are Earth science in the public service.
Thanks for watching.