The United States Drought Monitor: Then, Now, and the Future. Encapsulating the Gold Standard of Drought Monitoring

From a joint effort, combining of ideas from both Svoboda and LeComte in the late 1990’s, to what we currently are doing 25 years later, the United States Drought Monitor (USDM) has stood the test of time and has developed into the “Gold Standard” of drought monitoring not only in the United States but around the world. The USDM has always utilized the best available technology and data and the continual development of the process making the map has been quite evident all while maintaining the initial methodology of utilizing percentile ranking of drought indicators and indices. This methodology allows the USDM to not only change with the times, being able to adapt to new inputs and technologies, but also continues to allow that the best attributes of dozens of inputs along with expert input are utilized to have the best weekly assessment of drought possible for the United States. The flexibility of the USDM process is what will maintain it into the future where AI/ML techniques are already being developed creating composite drought indicators (CDI’s) that will feed into the USDM but will also help identify and characterize the various types of drought that are all incorporated into the single USDM product. 25 years in, the USDM is still relatively young in the climate world, but the next 25 years should be a period where more continuous changes and adaptations take place. As we do not know all the future advancements in data and technology, the books if far from written as to the possibilities of what the future may bring. If one had to guess, advances in data resolution and clarity, more CDI’s and gridded data all will continue to push the current thresholds of what is possible with current inputs.