Drought occurs when a region has an imbalance between water supply and
water demand over an extended period of time. Droughts can have
significant environmental, economic, and social consequences. Between
1980 and the present time, the cost of drought exceeded 100 billion
dollars, making drought monitoring a key factor in planning,
preparedness, and mitigation efforts at all levels of government.
Dataset Summary:
This
feature service provides access to current drought
intensity categories for the entire USA. These data have been produced
weekly since January 4, 2000 by the U.S. Drought Monitor, see the
Full Historical data for the full
time series. Drought intensity is classified according
to the deviation of precipitation, stream flow, and soil moisture
content from historically established norms, in addition to subjective
observations and reported impacts from more than 350 partners across the
country. New map data is released
every Thursday to reflect the conditions of the previous week.
Layer Summary:- 'US_Drought_Current': Polygon areas for most recent week
This Layer contains a series of drought classification summaries
that fall into two groups: Categorical Percent Area and Cumulative Percent
Area.
Categorical
Percent Area
statistic is the percent of the area in a
certain drought category and excludes areas that are better or worse. For
example, the D0 category is labeled as such and only shows the percent of the
area experiencing abnormally dry conditions.
Cumulative Percent Area statistics combine drought categories for a comprehensive percent of
area in drought. For example, the D0-D4 category shows the percent of the area
that is classified as D0 or worse.
Drought Classification Categories are as follows: