During the week of October 17th, many links to legacy real-time pages will be redirected to the NextGen monitoring location pages. This means that bookmarked links to the legacy real-time pages will be redirected automatically to the NextGen monitoring location pages. Here is an example legacy real-time page and the corresponding NextGen monitoring location page. In recent months, the Water Data for the Nation (WDFN) team has provided updates on new features that are now on the NextGen monitoring location pages and the upcoming redirect in the form of webinars, blog post, newsletters and video ..read more

Background The Water Quality Portal (WQP) database aggregates and standardizes discrete water quality data from numerous federal, state, tribal, and other monitoring agencies. The WQP enables the access and retrieval of over 297,000,000 water quality records (Read et al. 2017) through web services and an application programming interface (API) that can be called programmatically using the dataRetrieval package in R. Downloading data from the WQP represents a common pattern across USGS data teams. In this post, we highlight an example data pipeline to increase the reusability, reproducibil ..read more

The U.S. Geological Survey Water Mission Area is hiring two supervisory Data Scientists and one supervisory Water Information Product Manager. All three positions are full-time, permanent federal positions. Apply online at USA Jobs, where the positions will open and applications will be accepted 09/12/2022 to 09/16/2022, but the position may close early if there are more than 80 applicants. In that case, the vacancy will close at 11:59 PM ET on the day when that threshold is passed (all applications received before that time will be considered). For all positions, an unofficial transcript and ..read more

The USGS water data science branch in 2022 The USGS data science branch advances environmental sciences and water information delivery with data-intensive modeling, data workflows, visualizations, and analytics. A short summary of our history can be found in a prior blog post. Sometimes I refer to data scientists as experts in wrangling complex data and making it more valuable or usable. Within the data science branch, we are advocates for open science and build data science solutions that aim to maintain scientific integrity, cost less over the long-run, and are accessible for others to buil ..read more

The transition opens today, August 22nd, 2022 and will close on September 30th, 2022. Date What Will Happen August 2022 Next Generation WaterAlert is available August 22nd, 2022 Transition period opens September 30th, 2022 Transition period closes October 1st, 2022 Legacy WaterAlert is Decomissioned ? Check your email! Current users of Legacy WaterAlert will be able to take 3 simple steps to transfer their alerts to the Next Generation system. Users should have received an email from us with a unique link to the transition page for their specific alerts. YOU MUST CLICK THE LI ..read more

What are you decommissioning? In September of 2022, the USGS is shutting down (decommissioning) the Groundwater Watch application. This web application has served groundwater level data and statistics since 2006. Popular features of this product include individual site pages for wells and springs, maps of current conditions, and graphs showing the statistical context of recent measurements; major functionality of Groundwater Watch is pictured in Figure 1. Figure 1. A diagram indicating functionality offered by the Groundwater Watch Application. However, the application’s architecture, aging c ..read more

dataRetrieval is an R package that provides user-friendly access to water data from either the Water Quality Portal (WQP) or the National Water Information Service (NWIS). dataRetrival makes it easier for a user to download data from the WQP or NWIS and convert it into usable formats. This blog will walk through an example that uses the WQP summary service to limit the amount downloaded to only relevant data. For large datasets, that can save a lot of time and ultimately reduce the complexity of subsequent data processing. Large data example This blog sets up a scenario to look at all the tota ..read more

A new R computational package was created to aggregate and plot USGS groundwater data, providing users with much of the functionality provided in Groundwater Watch and the Florida Salinity Mapper. The Hydrologic Analysis Package (HASP) can retrieve groundwater level and groundwater quality data, aggregate these data, plot them, and generate basic statistics. Dcumentation is available in R or online, and users can also launch a Shiny Application from within the package to generate images in an interactive user interface. Two Data Streams, One Analysis One of the benefits of HASP is its ability ..read more

From the beginning of the work on the NextGen Monitoring Location pages through today, the Water Data for the Nation (WDFN) team has used the US Web Design System (USWDS) to provide guidance, style sheets, and components for our websites to make them mobile friendly and accessible. Four years ago, we started with USWDS version 1.x on the Beta version of our monitoring location pages. Since then, we have continued to use it in our new products while also introducing it to other projects within USGS such as USGS Publications Warehouse and interagency projects such as Water Quality Portal (WQP ..read more

The USGS Water Resources Mission Area (WMA) is the largest provider of real time and historical water information in the world. A major part of our work on information delivery is to build modern web applications and APIs to make these data publicly available. We use user-centered design to drive our product and feature development for all our product lines, including Water Data for the Nation (WDFN), Water Science School, and Water Quality Portal. This post explains what user-centered design is and how USGS Water incorporates it into our work. What is user-centered design? User-centered desig ..read more