The U.S. Geological Survey is pleased to announce the availability of two
important new water web services described below.
*** NEW Instantaneous Values Web Service for Real-Time data ***
Users now have the ability to retrieve USGS real-time instantaneous values
data for multiple sites with a single request. The service provides data
in Extensible Markup Language (XML) and the current tab-delimited (RDB)
file format supported by the USGS Water Data for the Nation site. This
service is production quality and highly available, meaning that it is
redundantly hosted, closely monitored and is available 24/7/365. In most
cases, you can expect a faster response using the web service than using
the USGS Water Data site. You can select data from multiple sites using a
broad set of filters, such as by state, county, watershed and a
latitude/longitude box. Moreover, if you take the time to change your
programs to get data as XML using the web service, your programs are less
likely to be affected by future changes to the data structures. If you
have programs that currently download tab-delimited real-time data, you
should seriously consider using this new web service instead.
You can learn more about the service at:
http://waterservices.usgs.gov/rest/WOF-IV-Service.html
You can experiment with the service at:
http://waterservices.usgs.gov/rest/WOF-IV-Test-Tool.html
*** NEW Site Web Service ***
Users can request basic information about a specific USGS hydrological
site or a range of sites within a given latitude and longitude. These
sites can be filtered for active, inactive or real-time only sites.
Filtering is also possible by certain site types such as surface water,
groundwater or atmospheric. A number of XML-based output formats are
provided, including two that ease the display of sites on Google Maps and
Google Earth.
You can learn more about the service and test it at:
http://waterservices.usgs.gov/rest/USGS-Site-Test-Tool.html
*** Daily Values Web Service ***
This service has been available for some time, but has moved from “beta”
to production status. Daily values are derived by summarizing time-series
data for each day for the period of record. This service is available as
both a REST and a SOAP service.
You can learn more about the service and test it at:
http://waterservices.usgs.gov/rest/USGS-DV-Service.html
*** Reminder ***
If you are using the interim single site instantaneous values web service,
the service will be formally retired on October 1, 2010. Please update
your applications to use the new Instantaneous Values web service by this
date.
*** More improvements are planned ***
In 2011, additional improvements are planned for all of these web services
including new features and data delivery formats. We will provide details
of these planned changes later this year. If you have suggestions on
features you would like to see in the instantaneous values, daily values
or site web service, please send them to gs-w_nwiswebservice@usgs.gov.
Documentation for all web services can be found at:
http://waterservices.usgs.gov
Mark D. Hamill