Pull current and historical groundwater level readings near a proposed septic site to verify seasonal high water table clearance
domain: api.waterdata.usgs.gov · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Find nearby groundwater monitoring wells by querying the monitoring-locations collection filtered by a bounding box around the parcel: GET /ogcapi/v0/collections/monitoring-locations/items?bbox=...
Note the monitoring_location_id values returned for wells tagged as groundwater sites.
Query the field-measurements or daily collection filtered by monitoring_location_id and a parameter_code for groundwater level to get historical readings.
Use the datetime parameter (e.g. P5Y for the last 5 years) to pull enough history to estimate seasonal high water table depth.
Sign up for a free API key at the USGS Water Data API signup page and pass it as api_key= to avoid the low anonymous rate limit.
Known gotchas
These OGC endpoints are explicitly labeled alpha/in-development by USGS -- verify field names against the live /collections/{id}/schema before hardcoding a parser.
Not every parcel has a nearby monitoring well; sparse well coverage in rural areas may force reliance on the NRCS soil water-table estimate instead.
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