dendroalsia.net/content/blog/RiverLevelCharts/index.md

750 B

+++ date = '2024-10-14T19:13:18Z' title = 'River level charts' image = 'example_last_6_months.png' +++

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