We are excited to announce a new feature on Monitoring Location pages that provide field measurements. Field measurements are physically measured values collected by USGS hydrology technicians during a visit to the monitoring location. Field measurements consist of measurements of streamgage height, discharge, and groundwater levels, and can be used as calibration readings for the automated sensors collecting continuous data. 

User-centered design is a process where we focus our designs based on the context and the needs of our users. We involve users throughout our agile and user-centered development process. The core principles of user-centered design are to learn about the users, build for their needs, and refine your designs based on their feedback. 

We conduct discovery research through a process called a path analysis, which helps us understand the problem space and identify a path forward by surveying our users. The goals of the WDFN multi-location path analysis were to understand who uses the functionality, why they use that functionality, and prioritize features to include in the modernized webpages. We spoke with dozens of users including emergency managers, canoe and kayak enthusiasts, USGS hydrotechnicians, river restoration managers, and many others!  

Subsequent to the path analysis, we conducted usability tests on early designs of the Combined Location Hydrograph, My Favorites-Graphed, and State Page. Getting feedback before these pages are available on the web is invaluable, and allows us to make quick adjustments, such as changing color, moving buttons, and identifying areas for future improvements. 

Interested in participating in user testing? Email wdfn_usabilitytesting@usgs.gov

NWISweb launched real-time data pages in 1995 and today it hosts more than 7 million annual unique visitors, billions of successful page requests, and terabytes of data delivered. After several years of modernization, we are beginning the final decommissioning or turning off of legacy NWISweb webpages held on https://waterdata.usgs.gov. This means that pages that you may have relied on for years are going away. 

Over three years, from October 2024 through February 2027, we will decommission NWISweb. We will do this in three targeted campaigns, which will take place between the months of October and February in each year (the lowest web traffic time of the year). We are making extra effort to avoid making changes while there are major water events like floods and hurricanes. By the end of the third campaign in early 2027, all NWISweb pages will be decommissioned and no longer available. 

Campaign 2 highlights:

• NWISWeb Decommissioning Campaign 2 will occur from now through February 2026 

• Decommissioning impacts include waterdata.usgs.gov/ URLs that include: /annual, /monthly, /dvstat, /dv, /gwlevels, /measurements, help.waterdata.usgs.gov, /inventory, /nwis, /rt, /water_use, /wys_rpt 

• WaterWatch and WaterQualityWatch will also be decommissioned 

We have recently updated our package dataRetrieval, which simplifies the process of finding and retrieving water data. This new version of dataRetrieval is designed to work with the modernized Water Data APIs and has several benefits for new and existing users: 

• Human-readable function names and arguments written in “snake case” (e.g., read_waterdata_samples()) 

• Customized functions for each of the Water Data API services (e.g., latest continuous values) plus a generic function that covers all services 

• API token registration option to overcome new limits on how many queries can be requested per IP address per hour. Visit https://api.waterdata.usgs.gov/signup/ for a token. 

• The new functions include ALL possible arguments that the web service APIs support