Colorado River Basin Streamgage Catalog

Water resources are tracked throughout the United States to assess the availability and consumption of water in a region. Two of the main methods used to track water resources in an area are stream gaging, in which the flow rate or discharge of a river/stream is measured, and precipitation measurements. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) operates a publicly-accessible streamgage network encompassing a large portion of United States major waterways, and precipitation gages in some areas. States, counties, municipalities, other federal agencies, and even private and non-profit organizations also operate streamgages and precipitation gages, however, the locations are not cataloged as the USGS gages are. This lack of data-pooling among the different operating agencies creates a data gap. The Colorado River Basin Streamgage Catalog thus provides a much-needed centralized database that catalogs USGS and non-USGS gages in the southwestern states comprising the Colorado River Basin; namely Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, Wyoming, and California. It will inform stakeholders of the streamgage and precipitation gauge locations, highlight the availability of water resource data, and increase the resource efficiency of the gaging networks. The Colorado River Basin Streamgage Catalog was created by obtaining streamgage and precipitation gauge locations from individual organizations in each state. Supporting metadata for each gage were also collected, such as measurement type and frequencies, operating agencies, and links to access the streamflow and/or precipitation data. The product is an interactive map, that when completed will be publicly-available as a web application using Tableau Public and a Google website.

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For inquiries regarding the contents of this dataset, please contact the Corresponding Author listed in the README.txt file. Administrative inquiries (e.g., removal requests, trouble downloading, etc.) can be directed to data-management@arizona.edu