DROUGHT: The Importance of Drought Indicators

Drought, such as the closing of the barge barge of the Mississippi River in 2012, may have a devastating effect on the environment and society. Under these influences, it is very important to understand and monitor drought. It is both science and art to judge the existence of drought. Scientists have studied quantitative and drought indices to gain broad prospects for regional water shortages. And they combined this information with the 'onsite' report on the effects of drought to fully describe the drought situation in specific areas.

"Dryness indicator" is a way to display one or more variables such as precipitation to describe the water available in soil and hydrological systems. This may be a record of a single measurement value, such as rainfall for a particular rain gauge, or it may be a complex indicator. Drought metrics allow scientists to explain droughts in a consistent way at different times and places. However, these climate-based drought measures do not reflect the effect of drought. Since population density increases and intensive agriculture may worsen the effect of drought, it is important to combine information to see the overall drought situation.

The indicators take various forms such as vegetation stress level, agricultural productivity, wildfire event, lake level, rainfall, snow, stream. All of these may indicate the occurrence, deterioration, or improvement of the drought condition.

As an authoritative body of US drought, the US drought monitoring agency combines all these drought metrics with various other evidences when preparing a weekly report. Indicators of drought are valuable at the time of writing of this report, as they show defects and improvements that are useful for creating sentences combined with stories.

This is part of a series of articles on the monitoring and evaluation of the drought situation throughout the United States. Please check back next week for more information on how the drought level reveals the overall situation or check weekly exercises behind the US drought monitoring agency.

Every week the US drought monitoring provides a way to calculate the drought severity and coverage index and calculate the severity and degree of drought in the whole country numerically. Higher values ​​indicate that wider land experienced drought. DSCI has reached over 115 in the last 6 weeks and has reached more than 100 in most of 2018. This indicates that rainfall is low nationwide. A wide range of abnormal drought or drought was in 2015 when we finally saw such a long depth

As an authoritative body of US drought, the US drought monitoring agency combines all these drought metrics with various other evidences when preparing a weekly report. Indicators of drought are valuable at the time of writing of this report, as they show defects and improvements that are useful for creating sentences combined with stories.

Drought, such as the closing of the barge barge of the Mississippi River in 2012, can have a devastating effect on the environment and society. Under these influences, it is very important to understand and monitor drought. It is both science and art to judge the existence of drought. Scientists have studied quantitative indicators and drought indices to gain broad prospects for regional water shortages. And they combined this information with the 'onsite' report on the effects of drought to fully describe the drought situation in specific areas.

"Dryness indicator" is a way to display one or more variables such as precipitation to describe the water available in soil and hydrological systems. This may be a record of a single measurement value, such as rainfall for a particular rain gauge, or it may be a complex indicator. Drought metrics allow scientists to explain droughts in a consistent way at different times and places. However, these climate-based drought measures do not reflect the effect of drought. Since population density increases and intensive agriculture may worsen the effect of drought, it is important to combine information to see the overall drought situation.