Decommissioning of Older USGS Gage Pages Draws Nigh

All of the legacy USGS gage pages that some paddlers have clung to with determination, even after newly designed pages were rolled out in 2022, are being decommissioned by the end of the year, USGS has reiterated.

USGS urged legacy page users to update their bookmarks while they still can. Redirects from the old URLs (waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/uv ...) to the newer ones (waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location …) will remain in place for about a year, but then the redirects too will be decommissioned and use of an old URL will produce a "404: No Page Found" message. The USGS over-arching new structure is called Water Data for the Nation, replacing the National Water Information System (NWISWeb)

The legacy page structure for real-time river data goes back to 1995. When it announced the move to the new pages, USGS said, "We recognize that many of you rely on these legacy pages and don’t want to see the legacy pages disappear; however, technical considerations and aging architecture have made the decommission imperative. The legacy webpages are held up by infrastructure that is no longer reliable and does not meet web and security standards of the 21st century."

For More Information

NWISWeb Decommission Campaign 3 (Details of NWISWeb Decommission Campaign 3 from November 2026 to February 2027), posted July 31, 2026, last updated Sept. 15, 2026

NWISWeb Decommission Campaign Summary (Summary of the NWISWeb webpage decommissions ongoing from October 2024 through February 2027), posted Dec. 6, 2024, last updated Sept. 15, 2026