Tutorial: USBR RISE data through the Western Water Datahub EDR API

1. The ideas you need (and none you don’t)

RISE (data.usbr.gov) is Reclamation’s public data catalog: reservoir storage, elevations, releases, canal flows, weather observations, and more, organized by location and parameter.

EDR (OGC API - Environmental Data Retrieval) is an open standard for asking environmental data questions with plain URLs: “what do you have?”, “what stations are in this box?”, “give me parameter X at location Y between these dates.”

WWDH is a server that republishes RISE (and several other federal water datasets) through that standard. The collection you will use is called rise-edr.

Why go through WWDH instead of RISE directly? Two reasons:

1. The URL patterns are a standard. Once you can query rise-edr, you can query SNOTEL snowpack, USACE reservoir, and PRISM climate collections on the same server with the same URL grammar (section 10).
2. Every response is available in machine-friendly formats (JSON, CSV) and a human-readable HTML page, so you can browse first and automate later.

https://api.wwdh.internetofwater.app / collections/rise-edr/locations/3514 ? f=json & parameter-name=3
└──────────────── base ─────────────┘ └───────────── path ──────────────┘   └───────── query ────────┘

curl -sS 'https://api.wwdh.internetofwater.app/collections/rise-edr?f=json'

2. Five-minute orientation in the browser

Open these three pages in order, just to look around:

1. The landing page: https://api.wwdh.internetofwater.app
2. The list of all collections on the server: https://api.wwdh.internetofwater.app/collections
3. The RISE collection page: https://api.wwdh.internetofwater.app/collections/rise-edr

The RISE collection page shows the description (“a proxy of the RISE API into the OGC API EDR format”), the spatial extent, the list of parameters, and links to the four query types RISE supports. For the complete technical reference of every route and parameter, see the Swagger/OpenAPI page.

Here is the live collection page, embedded from the service (this and the other embedded views below require an internet connection; open in its own tab):

3. Discover what RISE offers

The machine-readable version of the collection page is the anchor for everything else:

https://api.wwdh.internetofwater.app/collections/rise-edr?f=json

Two blocks in that document matter most.

data_queries lists the query types this collection supports. As of June 10, 2026, rise-edr advertises four:

Do not assume other EDR routes (like /position or /radius) work for RISE — a route that is not advertised in data_queries will return an error. Other collections on the server advertise different sets.

parameter_names lists every data variable you can request, keyed by RISE’s numeric parameter ids. Each entry carries a human-readable name, description, and unit.

4. Find the parameter ids you need

RISE parameters are identified by numbers, not names. The URL takes the number; the name and unit are there so humans can pick the right number. A few examples from the live metadata:

There are hundreds more. Two ways to find the one you need:

In the browser: open https://api.wwdh.internetofwater.app/collections/rise-edr and use your browser’s find-in-page (Ctrl+F / Cmd+F) on the parameter list.

With curl and jq: pull just the id/name/unit triples:

curl -sS 'https://api.wwdh.internetofwater.app/collections/rise-edr?f=json' |
  jq '.parameter_names | to_entries[] | {id: .key, name: .value.name, unit: .value.unit.symbol.value}'

Note that the same concept (for example “Lake/Reservoir Storage”) may appear under several ids that differ by timestep or computation method. Read the description text before committing to an id, and remember: labels are for humans; ids go in URLs.

5. Find locations

You will usually start from a place, not a parameter: “what does RISE monitor near here?” There are two complementary tools.

https://api.wwdh.internetofwater.app/collections/rise-edr/locations

min_lon,min_lat,max_lon,max_lat

https://api.wwdh.internetofwater.app/collections/rise-edr/locations?bbox=-115,33,-113,37

https://api.wwdh.internetofwater.app/collections/rise-edr/items?f=html&bbox=-115,33,-111,35&locationTypeName=Lake%2FReservoir&limit=20

https://api.wwdh.internetofwater.app/collections/rise-edr/queryables?f=json

https://api.wwdh.internetofwater.app/collections/rise-edr/items?f=csv&bbox=-115,33,-111,35&locationTypeName=Lake%2FReservoir&limit=20

https://api.wwdh.internetofwater.app/collections/rise-edr/items/3514

6. Get data for one location

Once you know a location id and a parameter id, the data request is one URL: /locations/{locationId} plus a date range and parameter. Lake Mead (3514), daily storage (3), January 2023:

https://api.wwdh.internetofwater.app/collections/rise-edr/locations/3514?f=json&datetime=2023-01-01/2023-01-31&parameter-name=3

Or as curl, saving to a file:

curl -sS -o lake-mead-jan2023.json \
  'https://api.wwdh.internetofwater.app/collections/rise-edr/locations/3514?f=json&datetime=2023-01-01/2023-01-31&parameter-name=3'

The two query parameters:

• datetime= takes an ISO date, or a range with a slash: 2023-01-01/2023-01-31. Some providers accept an open end: 2023-01-01/... Without datetime, you may get the full period of record — fine for some series, enormous for others. Start narrow.
• parameter-name= takes one or more parameter ids, comma-separated: parameter-name=3,1834.

{
  "type": "Coverage",
  "domain": {
    "domainType": "PointSeries",
    "axes": {
      "x": {"values": [-114.7]},
      "y": {"values": [36.0]},
      "t": {"values": ["2023-01-01T07:00:00Z", "2023-01-02T07:00:00Z"]}
    }
  },
  "ranges": {
    "3": {
      "type": "NdArray",
      "axisNames": ["t"],
      "values": [8730345, 8732112]
    }
  }
}

7. Get data for many locations at once: /cube

When you want every matching series inside a bounding box, use the cube route instead of looping over locations. All RISE storage (3) series in a small box around Lake Havasu, for calendar 2024:

https://api.wwdh.internetofwater.app/collections/rise-edr/cube?f=json&bbox=-114.3,34.1,-113.5,34.4&datetime=2024-01-01/2024-12-31&parameter-name=3

This returns a CoverageCollection: a coverages array in which each entry is one location’s series, with its own domain (the x/y coordinates and time axis) and ranges (the values). The example above returns one coverage — Lake Havasu, 365 daily storage values.

Practical guidance for cube:

• Keep the bbox tight and the date range short on the first try, then widen one thing at a time. Each cube request fans out to the upstream RISE API, so big requests are slow and can time out.
• If a broad cube fails, fall back to the discovery pattern: find candidate ids with /items (section 5b), then request each one via /locations/{id} (section 6).

8. Get data inside a polygon: /area

If your area of interest is a watershed or management boundary rather than a box, the area route accepts a polygon in WKT (well-known text) via coords=. A readable WKT polygon:

POLYGON((-115 35,-113 35,-113 37,-115 37,-115 35))

URLs cannot contain spaces, so each space becomes %20:

https://api.wwdh.internetofwater.app/collections/rise-edr/area?f=json&coords=POLYGON((-115%2035,-113%2035,-113%2037,-115%2037,-115%2035))&datetime=2024-01-01/2024-01-31&parameter-name=3

Two rules save most of the grief here: the polygon ring must close (first coordinate repeated last), and every space must be encoded. For complex boundaries, simplify the polygon first or use a tool that encodes URLs for you — very long URLs can exceed browser and server limits. If a box is close enough, prefer cube; it is simpler and faster.

9. Downloading and using the data

You now know how to build the URLs. Getting the results into your tools:

Browser: open the f=json URL and use Save Page As (Ctrl+S / Cmd+S), or right-click a link and Save Link As. The /items?f=csv URLs download directly as spreadsheet files.

curl: curl -sS -o output.json '<URL>'.

Excel: open /items CSV files directly. For JSON time series, Data → Get Data → From Web in Excel’s Power Query accepts the f=json URL and can unpivot domain.axes.t.values against ranges.{id}.values, though this takes some Power Query comfort — many people find it easier to ask a script-writing colleague (or an AI assistant) for a five-line converter from CoverageJSON to CSV.

GIS: QGIS and ArcGIS read GeoJSON natively. In QGIS, Layer → Add Layer → Add Vector Layer, choose Protocol: HTTP, and paste a /locations?f=json or /items?f=json URL to map RISE locations directly — no download step needed.

R: this package (edr4r) wraps all of these routes; edr_locations(), edr_cube(), and covjson_to_tibble() reproduce this tutorial in a few lines. See the companion vignette, Western Water Datahub collection field guide.

Python: requests plus the covjson-pydantic or plain json module; the axis/range pairing logic in section 6 is a five-line loop.

10. Interoperating beyond RISE

Everything above transfers. The same server hosts sibling collections that answer to identical URL grammar — only the collection id, the parameter ids, and the advertised query types change:

Check each collection’s data_queries before assuming a route exists (for example, usgs-prism supports position and cube, not locations).

https://api.wwdh.internetofwater.app/collections?f=json

{
  "name": "Lake/Reservoir Storage",
  "members": {
    "rise-edr": ["1470", "56", "51", "47", "3"],
    "usace-edr": ["Flood Storage", "Conservation Storage",
                  "Percent Flood Pool", "Percent Conservation Pool"]
  }
}

https://api.wwdh.internetofwater.app/collections/rise-edr/cube?f=json&bbox=-114.3,34.1,-113.5,34.4&datetime=2024-01-01/2024-12-31&parameter-name=3

https://api.wwdh.internetofwater.app/collections/usace-edr/cube?f=json&bbox=-114.3,34.1,-113.5,34.4&datetime=2024-01-01/2024-12-31&parameter-name=Flood%20Storage

11. The whole workflow on one page

1. ORIENT      /collections/rise-edr                  (browser, f=html)
2. PARAMETERS  /collections/rise-edr?f=json           -> parameter_names: pick exact ids
3. LOCATIONS   /collections/rise-edr/items?f=html&bbox=...&{queryable}=...&limit=...
               -> browse table; switch to f=csv to download; note location ids
4. ONE SERIES  /collections/rise-edr/locations/{id}?f=json&datetime=...&parameter-name=...
5. MANY SERIES /collections/rise-edr/cube?f=json&bbox=...&datetime=...&parameter-name=...
6. CROSSWALK   /collections?f=json -> parameterGroups, then repeat 3-5 on the sibling collection

Start small — one location, one parameter, one month. Widen one dimension at a time once the small request works.

12. Troubleshooting

If you get stuck on what a route accepts, the OpenAPI page documents every route and query parameter interactively, and every JSON document on the server contains a links section pointing to its related pages — when in doubt, follow the links.