Drought events happen every year around the world. Severe and prolonged droughts could cause heavy damages on agriculture food production and affect people's daily life. Dry conditions could create fuels for wild fires. Monitoring droughts can be a challenging task, especially in data sparse regions. Data from satellite observations provide additional important information in those regions.

This poster will describe services provided by the NASA Goddard Earth Sciences (GES) Data and Information Services Center (DISC) to support global drought monitoring activities. The services consist of two parts, maps and tools. All maps (URL: http://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov/agriculture/ais_sup/current_conditions.shtml) are derived from the Experimental Near-Real-Time TRMM Multi-Satellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA or 3B42RT). There are three types of maps, accumulated rainfall, rainfall anomaly and percent of normal rainfall for past 3 hours, 24 hours, 10 days, 30 days, 60 days and 90 days, respectively (Note: no anomaly and percent of normal maps for 3 hours and 24 hours). There are 16 global and regional maps, updated daily, for each of the past conditions. The daily climatology was derived from the 3-hourly TRMM and Others Rainfall Estimate (3B42 V6) between 1998 and 2005. These maps provide a convenient way to monitor global droughts, without data downloading, processing and maintenance.

The tools are provided by the TRMM Online Visualization and Analysis System (TOVAS, URL: http://disc2.nascom.nasa.gov/Giovanni/tovas/). Advanced users could use TOVAS to do customized rainfall analysis and visualization tasks including data outputs for other applications. More details and examples will be presented in the poster along with existing issues and future plans.