Ping: curtvprice -- RE: USGS waterservices xml

[JamesCrandall]

Curt or anyone else that has experience with the USGS waterservices webservice,

We have developed some Geoprocessing tools that are integrating the Instantaneous Values Web Service (http://waterservices.usgs.gov/rest/IV-Service.html) and using the return xml to create hydrographs, dynamic maps (.mxd's) that add these hydrographs as attachments to a FGDB, and some limited efforts to publish these to our internal ArcGIS Online portal. These are mostly tools for status reporting and supplemental materials in larger reports.  All is working great but we'd like to expand them a bit...

Without getting too far into the details of the geoprocessing tools and the outputs, we are also interested in accessing some of the other more detailed statistics that are available from the groundwaterwatch page(s) that generate the percentile ranking statistics over the period of record for individual wells for each month.

What is not clear is that the DV Webservice (http://waterservices.usgs.gov/rest/DV-Test-Tool.html) inidcates that a statistic "statCd" parameter can be included in the url string.  And looking at the list of Statistics Codes (http://help.waterdata.usgs.gov/stat_code), it appears that these percentile values are available.  However, when ever I include this parameter into the url string, nothing is returned. For example,

http://waterservices.usgs.gov/nwis/dv/?format=waterml,1.1&sites=262218080070101&period=P120D&paramet...


Any tips?  Is the chart in the site statistic section from this page http://groundwaterwatch.usgs.gov/AWLSites.asp?S=264005080233501&ncd= available from one of the webservices?  Can it generate an XML construct?

Thanks!
james

[curtvprice · Accepted solution]

James,

I'm not very familiar with this service. I honestly think the best way to address your question is to contact them by email. From the the Automated Retrievals FAQ:

How do I get help refining my URL query?
Please tell us what you want to do by sending an email to gs-w_support_nwisweb@usgs.gov.

Note to blatantly advertise, but everyone should know that a great deal of water information is available in a variety of formats from http://water.usgs.gov. This includes interactive web data retrievals, as well as embeddable web graphs (supports multiple parameters now!), and yes, XML services for your custom applications.

One of the coolest ways to get water data, IMHO, (esp. if you a fisherman or river rafter, or live near the water) is the recently enhanced wateralert service.

Have a safe weekend out on the water, everyone! Wear your PFD!

waterwatch.usgs.gov

Curtis

[JamesCrandall]

Thanks for the reply.  I had sent a inquiry through the online form regarding this.

Yes, the report output(s) are great (and are used now!) but we'd like to incorporate the percentile ranking chart(s) into our datasources for internal reporting.  Since this effort is about focusing in on specific sites, navigating thru the USGS site and generating these kind of focused report can be a bit time consuming.  By incorporating the XML webservice into arcpy, it allows us to internalize the data much more efficiently. 

Our apps generate url's (we've paramaterized these url's) and use other Python libraries to process the connection and return xml.  matplotlib and pandas libraries shape the return data and create hydrographs and arcpy is used to incorporate everything into FGDB's, .mxd's and in some instances we might publish select .mxd's to ArcGIS Server.

Anyway -- thanks for your input.
j