Three Years and Counting: What’s New with the Drought Monitor

Operational since late summer 1999, the Drought Monitor (http://drought.unl.edu/monitor/) has refused to remain static. This unique weekly product attempts to make an assessment of current drought conditions in the contiguous United States, Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico. Four entities now share in authoring the map: the National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC), Climate Prediction Center (CPC), United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). The Drought Monitor effort has led to the development of new products and has reinforced the need for improvement and support of existing climate networks critical to monitoring our nation’s climate. One of the new products recognizes that drought has different short- and long-term characteristics. This product combines indicators representing the semi-independent nature of short- and long-term characteristics to improve drought monitoring. We are calling this family of products the experimental Objective Blends of Drought Indicators (OBDI)