NOAA National Water Model
Hydrologic forecasting system
water.noaa.gov
At a glance
- Region
- USA (United States)
- Coverage
- 2.7 million river reaches
- Access
- Free
- Category
- Government
- Last updated
- 2025
What's inside
- Streamflow Forecasts
- Soil Moisture
- Snow
- Reservoir Levels
Terms explained
What you can do with it
Typical work that data of this type supports.
- 01
Design flows
Estimate 1-in-50 and 1-in-100 year floods for bridges, culverts and spillways.
Because it has: Streamflow Forecasts
- 02
Low flows
Set environmental flows and check what is left in the river in a dry year.
- 03
Irrigation scheduling
Decide when and how much to irrigate.
Because it has: Soil Moisture
Where AI adds value
Ideas for machine learning and AI agents built on this kind of data.
- 01
Flow forecasting
Train LSTM-style models on past records to forecast river levels and flow days ahead.
- 02
Ungauged basins
Combine with catchment data to estimate flow where there is no gauge.
- 03
Field-scale ET
Estimate crop water use per field by combining satellite and weather with ML.
Machine access and documentation
Open API
NWM via NOAA water.noaa.gov / NWPS API
Licence: US Government Work
Listed in our registry of open water APIs, which WaterDataGPT can query live.
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- NCAR CAMELS Hydrometeorological DatasetUnited States | Free
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