USGS Station Info

The SEACOOS list of USGS stations was obtained by very manual means. I used the NOAA nowCoast website to manually pick the list of USGS stations we'd potentially want. (The USGS "build table" mechanism missed many potential stations). NOAA nowCoast might not get every single one of them (their database may be behind), but it's easier for me to pick a location, visually, relative to mapped coast/estuary.

Then I went to USGS site and looked at gage height values (when available) to see if it had a tidal component. This list has about 56 coastal stations for NC, SC, GA, and FL but grows to 110 if you include LA, MS, AL, VA, DE, and NJ. Most of these have gage height (84 of 110). About 10-20% of these stations have water temperature and/or wind data.

The SEACOOS list of USGS stations should be reviewed for any potential new sites.

I did not discriminate stations based on what they measure. From cgi-scripts, anyone can access USGS realtime data. In their realtime data, they provide a call that gets all realtime data and what the parameter is. I wrote a perl-script that marches through a list of stations and reports back what these codes actually are.

Provided below are some Perl scripts to assist anyone wanting to poke around the USGS databases.

-- SaraHaines - 13 Apr 2025