Arif and I explored how to create a new Google Docs Spreadsheet. We discovered that the GSpread library was not capable of doing that by itself, so we searched around to find a way to do it:

Install the Google Data library with sudo apt-get install python-gdata and import the client library. This example was adapted from http://pastebin.com/zADrcEJU which Arif and I discovered by searching for how to create a new Google Spreadsheet with GSpread. This issue has some more background information: burnash/gspread#36

The next step for Arif & Alex is to move the filename variable from the top-level into a configuration file and to remove the filename hard-coded in the IPython Notebook. And then use gspread to insert the USGS data into the newly created Google Spreadsheet.