Exposing the National Water Information System to GIS through Web Services

October 6, 2005
Jonathan Goodall | Duke University

The National Water Information System (NWIS) is a hydrology data repository with stream flow, water quality, and groundwater observations maintained by the United States Geological Survey (USGS). The database includes 1.5 million monitoring stations in the United States and Puerto Rico, some with nearly 100 years of data. A web service was developed using Visual Basic .Net to better expose this national-scale data resource to client applications within the hydrologic community. One such client application is an extension to the ArcMap that was developed by the author for plotting time series and performing basic water balance analysis within a mapping environment. The plotting extension was originally created to read from local databases, requiring the user to manually download time series and format them into a certain database structure. Now that the software has been extended to consume the NWIS web service, it is possible to create “on-the-fly” plots of hydrologic observations for any station within nation.

Speaker Details

Jonathan Goodall is an Assistant Professor of the Practice of Geospatial Analysis at Duke University in the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences. His primary research and teaching interests are in geographic information systems applied to water resources science and engineering. He completed his Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2005.