USGS hydrography and watershed map services moving to the cloud

Screenshot of the topographic map layer with labeled water features from the ArcGIS “My Map” web service (Public domain)

Reston, Va. — As part of an ongoing effort to improve performance and reliability for the suite of USGS Hydrography web-based map services, the USGS is migrating the National Hydrography Dataset and Watershed Boundary Dataset services to a cloud location.

National Hydrography Dataset (NHD) and Watershed Boundary Dataset (WBD) dynamic web-based map services currently served directly from USGS endpoints are migrating to new cloud endpoints. The migration will improve performance and reliability while keeping separate and independently consumable NHD and WBD services. These new cloud endpoints also provide a more logical hierarchy for accessing USGS Hydrography web-based map services. This change will impact applications presently consuming the NHD and WBD layers from the previous service addresses.

USGS will provide a transition period through December 31, 2017. The previous endpoints from USGS servers will continue to be publicly accessible during this transition period. Users will need to use the new cloud service endpoints to access the NHD or WBD dynamic services after the transition period ends. In addition, users consuming the services from the previous endpoints will need to update application configurations for display of the desired layers.

An announcement will be posted in the “What’s New” section on the The National Map website (https://viewer.nationalmap.gov/launch) and information related to services on the “Links to Data Products and Map Services” page (https://nhd.usgs.gov/data.html) of the USGS Hydrography website (will document these changes. For more information on the National Hydrography Dataset, Watershed Boundary Dataset, and NHDPlus High Resolution, visit the USGS Hydrography (https://nhd.usgs.gov) and The National Map (https://nationalmap.gov) websites.