What watershed do i live in

This guide will help you start on the right path to connecting with your local watershed.

Table of Contents Show

Definitions
Watersheds Come In Many Sizes
So How Do You Identify Your Watershed
Create Your Own Watershed Map
What To Do With Your Watershed Address
Start Google Earth on your Computer
Download outlines of the watersheds of the United States
Find your watershed and download additional data for it
Explore your watershed

Definitions

First, what is a watershed? A watershed is an area of land (including underground too) that drains to a specific body of water. You may also hear the word basin used to describe the same thing. Many people use the word basin when they describe large bodies of water, such as rivers and bays (for example, the Chesapeake Bay Basin, Ohio River Basin, Lake Erie Basin, etc.). The word watershed is often used when referring to smaller bodies of water (Spring Creek Watershed, Crystal Lake Watershed, etc.). Don't be surprised if you see the words used interchangeably, however.

Watersheds Come In Many Sizes

Watersheds or basins exist in many different scales or sizes. As you explore your watershed, you will find that you live in many different watersheds, and this can lead to confusion. Just as you can describe your current location as in your chair, in your living room, in your home, in your neighborhood, in your town, in your state, in your country, etc. you can also name your watershed very locally or on a broader scale. For example, you may live in the Conewago Creek Watershed. Still, you also live in the larger Susquehanna River Watershed and the much larger Chesapeake Bay Watershed, all at the same time.

It is valuable to know the watershed associated with the stream that water drains to from your home, school, or workplace. The watershed from your home will likely differ from the one at your school or work. Knowing these local watersheds will help you understand how your daily activities impact your local watershed.

A typical watershed is illustrated here.

So How Do You Identify Your Watershed

There are a few good starting points for identifying your watershed. First, take a look at the maps included in this article. You will find a map of Pennsylvania that indicates the six major river basins in PA and a map of smaller basins within the state of Pennsylvania used by federal agencies such as the EPA and USGS for planning purposes. These two maps will help you start to find your local watershed and help you see your local watershed fit into the bigger picture of your community. You can find out which of those slightly smaller basins you live in by visiting the EPA's How's My Waterway website and entering your street address. You can learn a lot of other information about your local watershed on this website while you are exploring.

Pennsylvania's watersheds identified by the EPA and USGS, including HUC numbers used for identification purposes. (image credit: US EPA)

You can also try to identify your stream-based watershed address by reaching out to local resources and organizations. Your county planning commission or your county conservation district will likely have a map of smaller stream-based watersheds available, and it may even be on their website. Try doing an internet search for "[Your County] Watershed Map" or "[Your County] Watersheds." Remember that your county's name may not be unique to Pennsylvania, so make sure that it is your county if you find a map. If you can't find the map online, call your county conservation district and ask if they have a map they can share with you.

When you do figure out the name of the stream-based watershed that you live in (or work/attend school in), you might even be able to find a map of just your watershed online. Go ahead and search for it. You may find that your local watershed has a group of concerned citizens working hard to protect it through a watershed association, or you may find links to news stories about your watershed.

Create Your Own Watershed Map

You can also use online tools to create a map of your local watershed. The USGS has an interactive website known as StreamStats.

You can visit their "Interactive Map" and create your own local watershed map. Enter Pennsylvania in the Step 1 search box. Recenter and zoom in on your county and keep zooming in until you can identify your community. Keep moving the map around until you find where you live or work. Find the nearest stream to your location; if you are zoomed in enough, it will appear as a digital blue line. Click the delineate button on the left to turn on the delineation tool. Your cursor will turn into a crosshairs watershed delineation tool. Click on the stream near your home. After a few moments of thinking, the map will automatically generate a yellow watershed shape that you can explore and print for reference. Ensure that your home/school/etc. is inside that yellow area. If not, you picked a stream that may be close by but is not the one that water drains to from your home. Or you clicked on the blue line upstream from your house instead of downstream. You will have to go back and try again. Look closely at the map to be confident you picked the right stream or the right direction on the stream from your home.

You should be able to find a name for your stream, which is also your watershed's name. If it has no name, look to see the name of a more significant stream where your stream drains. Your stream would be called "unnamed tributary to xxx stream," where xxx is the name of that more significant stream (or river).

What To Do With Your Watershed Address

So now that you know your watershed name, you can start seeking information about it. Find out if your stream has a local watershed association. Search to see if your stream appears in the local newspapers. Look to see where the boundaries of your watershed are and who else is contributing to your local water quality. Congratulations, you have discovered your watershed address!

The Texas Watershed Viewer allows users to identify local watersheds, sub watersheds, river basins, and river sub basins throughout the State of Texas.

How to Use Watershed Viewer

1. Type your address into the search bar and press enter. The map will zoom into the address.

2. Click anywhere on the map and the feature will appear.

3. To view other features, click the right-facing and left-facing arrows, in the watershed box, for the other features to appear (Sub Watershed, Watershed, River Sub Basin, and River Basin). You may have to zoom out of map to view the river basins.

4. Enjoy exploring any location in Texas!

Check out the Texas Watershed Viewer

And the slimmed down mobile version: Mobile Texas Watershed Viewer

Related Topics:

Surf Your Watershed (SYW) has provided simple access to a rich collection of watershed information since its release more than 20 years ago. SYW has recently been decommissioned because of technology migration and related security issues.

Surf Your Watershed has been replaced by How’s My Waterway, Version 2, which incorporates much of SYW's content and expands relevant watershed information.

Now that you have made a model watershed, you'll check out real watersheds across the contiguous USA and explore the one in which you live.

Start Google Earth on your Computer

Google Earth is a freely available virtual globe program. It displays satellite images, aerial photographs, and graphic layers on personal computers by serving them over the Internet. Advanced versions of Google Earth are available for purchase, but this activity uses the free version.

If your computer doesn't have Google Earth installed, download and install the free program. Access the https://www.google.com/earth/versions/ 'Google Earth download page' new then download and install the free version of Google Earth for your operating system.
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1. Click this Google Earth download page link to open the download page in a new window.
2. On the download page, click "Agree and Download" and the software will be transferred to your computer.
3. Click "Run" twice, if you see more dialog boxes.
Launch Google Earth by double-clicking its icon or choosing it from the Programs list under the Start menu.
In Google Earth's menu panel on the left, under the Layers list, check the box in front of Borders and Labels to turn this layer on.
Minimize your Google Earth program and return to your Internet browser to access watershed data.

Download outlines of the watersheds of the United States

Go to the EDNA-Derived Watershed Atlas Home Page. EDNA Homepage There you will see two choices: one for HTML and one for KML. Start with the HTML site.
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On the interactive EDNA HTML map page, place your cursor (but don't click) over the names in the text list of watersheds to highlight them on the map. Be sure to take a look at the extent and location of the Colorado, Missouri, Ohio, and Mississippi watersheds.
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Place your cursor over the name of a watershed. It will highlight in blue on the map.
- How is it that the Mississippi watershed encompasses several other smaller watersheds?
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  Rivers of the smaller watersheds all empty into the Mississippi River. Every place within the Mississippi watershed eventually flows down the Mississippi River. Major tributary rivers that flow into the Mississippi are considered as separate watersheds within the Mississippi system.
On the interactive watersheds page, click the link above the map to switch to the KML page to download and view a Google Earth file of the US Watersheds.
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On this page, you can download individual watershed maps or a map of the entire United States. Click anywhere on the map graphic to download the .kml file that outlines watersheds of the contiguous United States. Note that .kml stands for Keyhole Markup Language—this is one of the file extensions for Google Earth files. This large file may take a few minutes to download; save it in a place where you can find it again.
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Right-click to download this KML file of watersheds USwatersheds.kml (KMLFile 1.5MB Oct25 11) instead of using the link above.
Re-launch to Google Earth. If necessary, open USWatersheds.kml by choosing File > Open and browsing to the location where you saved the file. To make returning to this file easier, you can save it to your "My Places" folder.
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Highlight the Major US Watersheds layer in the Layers list, then choose File > Save...

Find your watershed and download additional data for it

Google Earth displaying the landcover layer for the Trinity Watershed in Texas.

In the Search field at the upper left, enter your city and state name then click the magnifying glass. Google Earth will fly to your city and zoom in.
Zoom out from your city until you see your entire watershed outlined in red. Click the green circle with blue lines that shows next to the name of your watershed.
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- Right along the coastline, water flows directly downhill into the ocean along small streams, so these areas are not considered as parts of inland watersheds.
- The topography of some regions funnels all the precipitation to a point within the watershed. In these basins, water gathers in a land-locked lake rather than flowing to the ocean.
Inside the dialog box that opens, click the "View the _____ watershed" link. This action directs your computer to download additional information for your watershed. Be patient: it usually takes a minute or more to download these data, and there is no evidence of anything happening while you wait.
When you see an overlay on the map showing a landcover image over your watershed, the data layers have been downloaded. Scroll to the bottom of your Layers list in Google Earth to find a new folder with your watershed's name.

Explore your watershed

Several sample images from the EDNA server can be viewed using the images linked in the hidden below.

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Click on the images linked below to learn more about these watersheds. These are a few of the images that are linked to the Google Earth file. Click the thumbnails for a larger view.

Arkansas

Brazos

Colorado TX

Mississippi

Navidad

Nueces

Red

RioGrande

Sabine

Trinity

In Google Earth, in the Layers panel, click the small triangular arrow that points to the Watershed Layers folder; this will expand the folder so you can see all the data layers available to you.
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- The "Watersheds Characteristics" layer shows a button on the map that gives you access to Web pages about the watershed. Deselect this layer during your Google Earth exploration.
- Expand the sub-folders for Landcover, Population, and Streams and turn separate layers on and off. Use the legends to interpret the colors on the map.
- Examine the relationships among the layers. Click the name of a layer in the Layers list and use the transparency slider just below the list to see through your highlighted layer.
After some exploration, turn on your Elevation layer and make sure it is not transparent. Turn landcover and population images off. In the stream layer, turn on the largest streams
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the ones that have the highest values for CMS (cubic meters per second). Sequentially add the smaller streams by clicking the boxes for streams of decreasing size. Note the patterns that develop as you add the smaller streams that are tributaries to the larger rivers.
Turn the smaller stream layers on and off to help you visualize the location of drainage divides within your watershed. Compare a zoomed in view of the smallest streams to what you saw in your physical watershed model.
Return to the interactive EDNA HTML page, click on a watershed of interest, and go to that watershed's page of informational links. Click the Dams link to see the types and locations of dams that have been built to keep water from running downhill.
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In the screen shot, below, the Dams link has been selected. The image is showing Dams Characteristics.
Go back to your Google Earth map and turn off all Elevation, Landcover, and Population images. Leave all stream layers on. Zoom in to one of the larger streams to check out one or more of the dam sites shown in the online graphic.
Turn on the Terrain layer at the bottom of the Layers list and use Google Earth's tilt and zoom features for further exploration.
Choose another watershed in a different part of the contiguous United States. Access the data layers for it and explore them to compare that watershed to your own.

3. Starting at the largest river in your watershed, use the tilt and zoom features of Google Earth to "fly" upstream along smaller and smaller tributaries. What differences do you see in the landscape, landcover, and population densities near the areas' largest streams compared to its smallest tributaries?

4. Write a description of your watershed. Include information about the shape of the land and how the land is used. What purposes do the dams in your watershed serve? Indicate how the population density of the area changed from 1990 to 2000. Use screen shots of different views in your Google Earth map to support or illustrate your description.

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On a Windows computer, press Alt and Printscreen at the same time; this will save an image of the screen in the computer's clipboard. Place the image in a word processing document by choosing Edit > Paste.
On a Macintosh, press shift-command-4 (command key=apple key) and drag a box over the area of the map you want to capture. This will produce a file named Picture1.png on your desktop. Use Insert > Picture > From File to place the image into your word processing document.

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Can you predict what the weather will be like in your area six months from today?

While you may not be able to give a detailed description of the day's temperature or the exact likelihood of rain or snow, you can probably make an accurate estimate of the general conditions. The yearly pattern of temperatures and precipitation experienced during each month are generally predictable. The long term pattern of weather—established by gathering and compiling data over many years—describes the climate of your location.

Page 3

Your longtime pen pal from Australia has just written to you. He's planning to visit you next May and he wants to know what to bring for clothing and shoes. Will he need a rain jacket or sweatshirt? Can he plan on wearing sandals or will he need boots? In order to answer his questions, you try to remember what the weather was like last spring.

Talk with a lab partner about ways you might find out what "normal" May weather is like in your area.

Climate

You know that weather conditions in any area follow a typical pattern through the year. Your weather is different each season, but it can be expected to remain within a normal range of conditions for different times of the year. This repeating pattern of normal weather conditions that an area experiences over many years is known as climate.

Terms such as hot, windy, rainy, and humid are all descriptors of climate, but the two most important factors in climate are temperature and precipitation. When you respond to your pen pal, the two things that he'd really like to know are probably "How hot or cold will it be?" and "How likely is it to rain?"

To generate and interpret graphs of an area's climate, go to the National Climatic Data Center's Divisional Data Interface ( This site may be offline. ) (link will open in a new window).
- On the Data Retrieval page, click the "State" tab first (this seems to prompt the states to load) and choose your state, then click the "Division" tab.
- Select a division or region of the state. In order to look at a range of locations, your teacher may assign a specific place for you to investigate.
- Use the dropdown menus to select Starting and Ending dates that span the last full calendar year (January through December).
- Click the Static Graphs radio button and select Temperature from the pull-down menu.
- Next to the word "Show," make sure that "All Months" is showing.
- Click Submit.
On the graph that appears, read the axes labels and the legend to interpret what it means. Does this graph provide you with enough information to answer your pen pal?
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Temperatures on the graph represent mean (average) temperatures in degrees Fahrenheit. The average temperatures reflect day and night temperatures across the selected area.
Use your browser's back button to go back to the Data Retrieval Page. Use the same selections as before, except for changing the Start Date two years earlier so that you request the last 3 years of temperature data.
On the three-year temperature graph, check and record the values reported for each May.
Go back to the Data Retrieval Page again. This time, request a static graph of precipitation for the last full year (January to December). Read the axes to interpret the graph. Look for patterns that indicate whether the region you are studying appears to have a rainy season or a dry season.
Generate another graph to show three years of precipitation data.
1. Do the two three-year graphs provide enough information for you to discover the "normal" temperature and precipitation levels for your region each May? Describe your reasoning.
2. What other information could you use to characterize the climate?
Go back to the Data Retrieval Page again. In the drop-down box next to the word Show, highlight "May" and set the Starting and Ending Dates to request May temperatures for the last 10 years.
Explore the data by generating several more graphs, requesting temperatures and precipitation levels for various months over the full range of the data.
3. List some of the things you learned in your exploration.
4. What can you learn from the blue 1-year moving average and the red total average lines?
5. Following your exploration, write your pen pal a brief description of the average conditions he can expect in May.