One of the authors of the U.S. Drought Monitor shares how this product is developed and produced on a weekly basis. Rod Bain reports.

PARTICIPANTS:

Rod Bain and Brian Fuchs of the National Drought Mitigation Center

Transcript

It may not seem like the time to talk about the U.S. Drought Monitor, what with winter, precipitation, and lots of snow and rain this season, but ever wondered where the input to the Weekly Drought Monitor comes from?

Ten authors from various federal climatology organizations, thousands of contributors from the state and local levels.

Some of these people are part of USDA.

There is also public input via the drought monitor online condition monitoring observation reports.

Seymour for short.

And then there is the data, all kinds of data.

In any given week, we look at a good 100 or more pieces of data through several dozen types of inputs that we're utilizing.

So Brian Fuchs of the National Drought Mitigation Center, what exactly are you and the other authors of the drought monitor looking at data wise each week?

What the drought monitor is trying to do is get a snapshot of drought conditions at that point in time.

It's not projecting it forward, but it is looking backwards anywhere from the last couple weeks all the way back to the last couple years.

There's some of these indicators that we can go back and look at several years back and see these dry signals.

Then there is the definition of drought per the various data sets inputted manually and studied by the authors.

And drought just isn't the lack of rainfall or precipitation or snowfall.

It's what's happening to the landscapes and ecosystems around us.

So we do look at things like soil moisture.

We look at things like river and stream flows, groundwater, reservoir levels.

In the wintertime, the upper elevation snowpack is important.

Another focal point of study is what the data tells about water demand.

We have several types of satellite tools that we are implementing now.

Very high resolution cover the entire country.

And they tell us where these wet and dry periods are taking place and how much demand from the natural ecosystem is taking place as well.

Also available to the drought monitor authors, what Fuchs calls a slew of data-driven drought indexes.

Some of these are made with gridded data that we get estimates from, from things like radar.

Some of them are point data, where we actually have weather stations on the ground through different federal agencies and mesonets, and we can calculate these indices and look at what the current drought means in a historical perspective.

So with all that data.

We have different thresholds that all the data fall into.

We call it a percentile ranking methodology where we can take all the current data and compare it to where it would rank historically and that's where the drought categories get implemented from.

That each one of those drought categories that we show on the map has a specific range of where the majority of the data are falling when we rank them.

I'm Rod Bain reporting for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C.