Cameras · USGS gauge cams
A number tells you
the flow. A photograph
tells you the day.
The USGS runs cameras at monitoring stations all over the country, most of them bolted to a streamgauge. Click a pin and you get the most recent frame — the same water the discharge reading is describing, with the station number and the time stamped into the picture.
Imagery and gauge data courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey, public domain. Basemap tiles © Esri, © OpenStreetMap contributors.
Nothing loads until you ask
The map itself is just pins — positions, names and gauge numbers, from a file this site ships. No picture is requested until you click a camera and press the button. That is deliberate: the images live in a USGS bucket on Amazon, and quietly fetching hundreds of thumbnails would hand your address to Amazon hundreds of times for a page you were only browsing. Same bargain as the video embeds here — you decide, then it loads.
What a camera is good for
Mostly it answers the question a gauge cannot. Discharge tells you there are 3,080 cubic feet going past every second; it does not tell you the river is the colour of chocolate milk, or that the ramp is under water, or that there is still snow on the bank. Ten seconds of looking settles things that a number leaves open.
Two habits worth having. The timestamp is burned into the frame by the USGS, so check it against the caption — a camera that stopped reporting three days ago will still hand you a perfectly sharp photograph of last Tuesday. And a night shot is infrared, which makes clear water look black and gives you almost nothing; if the picture is monochrome, wait for morning before reading anything into it.
Where the gaps are
There are cameras in 42 states, and they are not spread evenly — there is far more of this in the Midwest and the East than in the mountain West. Cameras the USGS has flagged as hidden, and any that have not sent a frame in two weeks, are left off the map entirely: a pin that opens onto nothing is worse than no pin, because you cannot tell the difference until you have clicked it.
Small water at the end of a long road does not have a camera on it, and that is the usual state of affairs rather than an oversight.