US and Global Drought, Drought Monitoring, Drought Forecast: Current Forecast

News Update

Nov 5
A disk failure has caused the nowcast/forecast system to be offline.
May 26
Realtime drought monitor had problems with precipitation forcing and has been fixed for the last 4 weeks
Nov 20
Historical Drought conditions are created for 1951-2004.
Oct 21
Drought monitoring and prediction activities are back to normal.

Drought Conditions On 20120202

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The drought analysis is based on comparing the current soil moisture against the 54-yr retrospective climatology. The climatology is developed separately for each grid cell (> 55,000 cells in the USA) in the form of a pdf. The original drought analysis (Sheffield et al. 2004) fitted beta distributions to the soil moisture data. In this update we use empirical distributions based directly on the data. The plots shows the percentile of current soil moisture with respect to the 54-yr climatology defined as all values in a 49-day sampling window centered at 20120202.