Building an Enhanced Drought Climatology Decision Support Tool: The Drought Risk Atlas

In order to answer the common questions of “How does this drought compare to the Dust Bowl drought?”, or “How often do we see a drought as severe as this?”, the National Drought Mitigation Center set out to build on the work initially done by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, IBM and the National Climatic Data Center during the early 1990s. Access to new digital data sources, geospatial tools and analyses, and dissemination through a web-based interface has allowed us triple the atlas station sample size and roughly double the period of record in standing up the Drought Risk Atlas (DRA). Examples of the data, maps and visualization tools built into the DRA will be displayed and discussed with an aim of showing potential linkages into drought risk management planning and decision making.