Standardized Drought Indices on Drought.Gov, Produced with Climate Engine and Google Earth Engine, from Multiple Foundational Precipitation and Temperature Datasets

NOAA has partnered with the Western Regional Climate Center (WRCC), the Desert Research Institute (DRI), UC Merced and Google to develop Climate Engine, a cloud computing web application in which programmers and non-programmers alike can quickly and easily process and visualize satellite and climate data in an interactive User Interface (UI) and Application Programming Interface (API). Data storage, access, and on-demand processing and storage is accomplished using the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and the massively parallel cloud computing platform Google Earth Engine. Common climatic operations, along with multiple modern drought indices, have been coded into Google Earth Engine and made available in the Climate Engine UI and API. Users can adjust several settings within these drought algorithms, facilitating unprecedented near-instantaneous intercomparison between types of parameter fittings, evapotranspiration estimate types, temperature and precipitation datasets and periods of record.

Drought.gov now operates an operational version of the Climate Engine API, running within a NOAA Cloud environment, leveraging both a NOAA contract with Google Earth Engine and the NOAA Open Data Dissemination (NODD) program. Drought.gov is using Climate Engine to produce hundreds of drought indices each day, based on multiple leading foundational datasets from NOAA, NASA, and other partners. These indices are standardized to use the same climate reference period (1991-2020), distribution fittings and potential evapotranspiration methodologies. The data is updated daily and available in both GeoTIFF and web-map-ready XYZ tile formats.