In support of this vision, the U.S. Drought Portal (USDP) will be a national resource for data, models, risk information and impacts of drought, with responsibility for integrating, archiving, and disseminating data via the internet. A portal environment, defined as a site on the World Wide Web that typically provides personalized capabilities for their visitors, is critical, as it allows selected drought information from multiple authorities to be consolidated and interrogated, while simultaneously using metadata references to identify emerging information from the drought community.
The USDP will provide reliable information on drought conditions at county, regional and national scales and serve as the primary point of entry for drought-related queries (through the already secured drought.gov URL) for a variety of user groups. Such questions include:
Where are drought conditions now and where might they develop?
Does this drought event look like other events in the past?
Will the drought continue?
How is the drought affecting me?
How can I plan for and manage the impacts of drought?
The USDP will be comprised of information tailored for various user communities. The portal will work by combining NIDIS-related data and information with tools necessary to exchange and integrate data on various space and time scales, and among various formats. These portal data will incorporate a spectrum of information from both federal interagency and non-federal sources.
Supplementary URL: http://www.drought.gov