This summer, I was hired by David Hart, the coastal GIS specialist for UW Sea Grant to build a dashboard for viewing streamflow statistics in the Fox/Wolf rivershed here in Wisconsin.
Given the dashboard approach, I wanted to create something very aesthetically pleasing, flexible, and easy to use. For the data display, I coded a plot similar to that used by Google Finance. This puts all data at the user's fingertips, and allows them to focus and zoom in on the period of interest.
The project is very much in progress, but you can get a sneak peek at my secret development address
As I suggest in the title, this project is easily extensible into a nationwide USGS station statistical viewer. Any of the variables recorded at the nation's hundreds of USGS stations could be viewed, analyzed, and compared in my data plot. The coding required would be moderate (loading the massive amounts of data quickly would be the tough part). Hmm...