Key Changes & Timeline
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NWISWeb will retire all remaining pages, including the legacy Current Conditions (/uv) pages, in phases from November 2026 through February 2027, ending with full decommissioning.
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WaterServices (waterservices.usgs.gov) will be decommissioned on February 22, 2027. Service degradation begins November 2026, with planned outages in January 2027. All automated access should migrate to api.waterdata.usgs.gov before January 2027 to avoid interruptions.
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NWISMapper will be decommissioned in November 2026. Bookmarks will redirect to Explore USGS Water Data for one year. Legacy NWISMapper has already begun experiencing degradation, including the loss of some connections to NWISWeb due to necessary infrastructure updates.
What’s Changing
Public access to water data is not going away — but the way you access it may change. Water Data for the Nation (WDFN) APIs and webpages now provide modernized access to the same core data, including peaks, revisions, ratings, and continuous data.
WDFN’s Monitoring Location Pages provide all data and metadata available for a site and include an interactive graph that allows users to zoom, change time ranges, and add additional parameters. Peaks, revisions, and ratings have recently been integrated into the Monitoring Location Pages, giving users easy access to all data related to a site.
For users who prefer the familiar layout of the legacy Current Conditions (/uv) pages, the Monitoring Location Page – All Graphs offers a scrollable set of static graphs for every continuous data type collected at that location; a format closely aligned with the legacy experience. Users who need to view similar graphs for multiple locations can use My Favorites, which allows you to create a custom list of sites which can be viewed as a series of graphs across all selected locations. This gives cooperators and internal users a modernized but recognizable way to review data either by a single monitoring location or across a customized group of monitoring locations.
WDFN APIs fully replace the legacy WaterServices and also introduce new API endpoints for peaks, revisions, and stage‑discharge ratings. These modernized services provide the same underlying data as WaterServices in web-native formats following open standards that improve the interoperability of USGS water data. Learn more about how to migrate to the new services.
The dataRetrieval R and Python packages now support the new APIs. Users will need to update their code to use the new “read_waterdata” functions (in R) or the “waterdata” module (in Python). Tutorials about the new functions are available for both the R and Python libraries.
Explore USGS Water Data provides the capability to find locations nationwide, even if the location is no longer actively monitored. In addition to filtering by location type, as in NWISMapper, locations can be filtered in Explore USGS Water Data by:
- Data collection category (e.g., continuous, daily, field measurements, and discrete sample data)
- Time range of data
- Keywords or parameter codes to show locations that collect specific types of data
Data can be downloaded for multiple locations at once by creating a My Favorites page and downloading from there. Learn more about these features here: New Feature - Explore USGS Water Data.
More details on the decommission are available here: NWISWeb Decommission Campaign 3.
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