Improving Canada's Drought Monitoring System with New Data and Tools

The Canadian Drought Monitor is a national monitoring assessment and reporting system for Canada. This activity is led by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. Monthly assessments are done throughout the year for the entire country except the Arctic. This activity uses a variety of data sources including agroclimate maps, a variety of drought indices, satellite data, modeled data, and impact information from a network of on-the-ground volunteer reporters. The assessment is essentially a convergence of evidence methodology. The draft assessment is reviewed by a group of experts, and the final version is posted online on the Departmental website. The methodology is modeled after the one established by the United States Drought Monitor. The Canadian results are shared with the national results from the United States and Mexico and together the collective results are assembled into a monthly North American drought map which is hosted on U.S. NOAA's website. Over the past five years, the number of data sources and tools utilized in the Canadian Drought Monitor have been expanded and testing of additional new data sources is in progress. Data sources include satellite soil moisture, a vegetative drought index, a standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index, a fire index, the Canadian Precipitation Analysis product, agroclimate impact information from a network of on-the-ground volunteer reporters, and data from the Community Collaborative on Rain Hail and Snow citizen science network. In late 2018, a collaborative research project led by AAFC with Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), Natural Resources Canada, and U.S. NOAA was initiated to develop a first-ever drought outlook for Canada. This project is working with ECCC's Global Ensemble Prediction System forecasting products, and testing is in progress to determine a combination of ensembles and indices that result in the most accurate monthly drought outlooks across Canada. With respect to new tools for the Canadian Drought Monitor, the ESRI suite of ArcGIS tools have been utilized to dramatically increase the back-end efficiency of assessments and the review process. And for the online users, visualization and analysis tools have been added to allow users to view and explore the data and the map products. The tools include, a timeline viewer, an interactive story map, a compare tool, a change over time tool, and statistics and graphs. View the Canadian Drought Monitor activity online at www.agr.gc.ca/drought .