Western US Rivers Named

Reach File Version 1.0 (RF1) is a vector database of approximately 700,000 miles of streams and open waters in the conterminous United States. It is used extensively by EPA and States, and has been used by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Weather Service for many years. This configuration of RF1 for the geographic information systems community, extends the use of RF1 to ARC/INFO users in the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and others.RF1 was prepared by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency(EPA) in 1982 from stable base color separates of National Oceanographic and Aeronautical Administration (NOAA) aeronautical charts having a scale of 1:500,000. These charts provided the best nationwide hydrographic coverage available on a single scale at that time. They included all hydrography shown on USGS maps having a scale of 1:250,000 with extensive additions, corrections and improvements in detail made by NOAA from aerial photography and satellite imagery. All hydrographic features on those charts were optically scanned from the color separates using a scanner resolution finer than feature line width. The surface water features selected for inclusion in the RF1database were converted from the scanned raster form to vector form with coordinates expressed as latitude and longitude. Surface water names in RF1 were derived from the source maps and supplemented by names from miscellaneous state maps and maps of the USGS. Many other RF1 attributes are described herein. In the 1980's, RF1 was used by EPA for performing water quality modeling on whole river basins for all of the hydrologic regions in the conterminous United States. In this role, it was used to provide national assessments and overviews of water quality and to provide the foundation for a nationwide stratified sampling frame for performing statistical summaries of modeled and measured water quality on all the surface

Data quality information