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We present the design and development of an open-source web application called Water Data Explorer (WDE), designed to retrieve water resources observation and model data from data catalogs that follow the WaterOneFlow and WaterML Service-Oriented Architecture standards. WDE is a fully customizable web application built using the Tethys Platform development environment. As it is open source, it can be deployed on the web servers of international government agencies, non-governmental organizations, research teams, and others. Water Data Explorer provides uniform access to international data catalogs, such as the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science (CUAHSI) Hydrologic Information System (HIS) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Hydrological Observing System (WHOS), as well as to local data catalogs that support the WaterOneFlow and WaterML standards. WDE supports data discovery, visualization, downloading, and basic data interpolation. It can be customized for different regions by modifying the user interface (i.e., localization), as well as by including pre-defined data catalogs and data sources. Access to WDE functionality is provided by a new open-source Python package called “Pywaterml” which provides programmable access to WDE methods to discover, visualize, download, and interpolate data. We present two case studies that access the CUAHSI HIS and WHOS catalogs and demonstrate regional customization, data discovery from WaterOneFlow web services, data visualization of time series observations, and data downloading.