Continental US Rivers

Flow Accumulation · 90 m DEM

What you're looking at

Every river, creek, and drainage in the contiguous US — extracted from raw USGS 90 m elevation. Pan from the Pacific Northwest to the Mississippi Delta watching the entire continental drainage system unfold. Click any stream segment for its Strahler order.

Watershed Stats

SourceUSGS 3DEP 90 m

Stream segments364,685 (vector)

Max Strahler order8 (Mississippi)

Resolution note90m (30m OOM'd at 175 GB)

AlgorithmD8 + Strahler

ToolWhitebox Tools

Major Rivers

Mississippi at the GulfS8
Missouri at the MississippiS8
Ohio at the MississippiS7
Colorado / Grand CanyonS7
Columbia at the PacificS7
Rio Grande at the GulfS7
Sacramento DeltaS6
Hudson at New YorkS5

How it works

The continental US drains in three directions: east to the Atlantic via the Mississippi-Missouri-Ohio system (the dominant trunk on the map), west to the Pacific via the Columbia and Sacramento, and south to the Gulf via the Rio Grande and the Mississippi mouth itself. The Continental Divide is visible as the spine of the Rockies where the network reverses direction.

90 m source data was chosen over 30 m because BreachDepressions on the full CONUS DEM at 30 m peaks at ~175 GB — outside our compute envelope. Visually identical at continent zoom; finer detail awaits a bigger box.

Pitch context: this is the same engine that renders a 160-acre RTK survey at sub-meter resolution. The pipeline doesn't change — only the bounding box.

Sources & tools listed at /data