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River level charts

Oct 14, 2024 | 1 minute read

I’m interested in rivers (both ecologically and recreationally) and I want to know

  • what water level different rivers are currently at
  • how does that compare to their water levels throughout the year and in their recent history

In the US, the United States Geologic Survey (USGS) maintains a large set of realtime water level sensors, and that dataset is queriable through an API. So I wrote these scripts that take a set of rivers and their associated gauge IDs, downloads the recent and historical data and generates a bunch of graphs.

Here’s the code: https://git.dendroalsia.net/ben/USGS_NWIS

Example graph