U.S. Geological Survey

Trusts AQUARIUS to manage data collected from over 16,500 monitoring sites.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) relies on AQUARIUS for use by 3,000 employees of the Water Resources Division to more efficiently manage water time series data nationally from 16,500 stream gauging, groundwater, water quality, and precipitation sites. Big Water Data is being collected – with 3 million time series nationwide and over 100 billion historical data points. The USGS data acquisition system results in 500,000 appends per hour, with multiple parameters per site. By moving to the most modern commercial environmental time series data management platform, the USGS has increased data consistency, comparability, and reliability.

USGS rating curves have been built in AQUARIUS since 2005.

The USGS has trusted the customized AQUARIUS Graphical Rating and Shift Application Tool (GRSAT) since 2005. It relies on AQUARIUS to correct and edit time series data, and to build accurate and defensible rating curves across all 50 USGS Water Science Centers. The USGS has reported saving over 59,000 hours per year by using AQUARIUS GRSAT. According to the USGS, “Use of GRSAT over the past year has shown that about 8 hours of labor are saved on average each year per streamgage – a significant cost savings when applied to the national network of approximately 7,400 gages.” (USGS Fact Sheet 2007). By adopting the full AQUARIUS Time-Series system, the USGS now anticipates dramatically increasing their time series data management efficiency.