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Enhanced Drought Aware App Offers More Ways to Explore the Effects of Drought

The Drought Aware app, available in ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World, provides information about drought-affected areas in the United States over various time intervals from 2000 to today and across different drought intensities.

After a recent enhancement to the app, Drought Aware integrates critical information from additional data layers, including population, housing, river flow, reservoirs, crops, and agricultural labor. Now, users can engage with the app to gain comprehensive insight into the impacts that droughts have on communities across the United States.

Map of the contiguous United States depicting drought conditions the week of October 25, 2022. Shades of yellow, orange, and red represent areas of abnormally dry to exceptional drought conditions, respectively.
Drought Aware gives users insight into the effects of drought across the United States.

Three Categories of Information

The Drought Aware app summarizes information in the following three main categories:

Several Ways to Explore Drought

There are many ways to explore the phenomenon of drought in this app.

The topmost timeline shows categories of drought severity since the year 2000 as a proportion of the total amount of land in the United States. Users can choose a point in time to see that week’s geographic ranges of drought.

A map of Nebraska and surrounding states showing the economic impact of drought on crops. The map is color coded from yellow (low impact) to dark red (high impact).
The Agriculture button shows the potential economic effects of drought based on major crops, labor, and more.

The sector chart in the top-left corner of the screen provides a detailed breakdown of the proportion of the nation experiencing drought at that time. Users can hover over any portion of the chart to see which areas of the country experienced various drought severities. Buttons indicating the week and the year let users go chronologically backward or forward by week or by year to get a comparative sense for drought in different areas of the country.

When no location is selected, the timeline and drought intensity class represent the extent of drought for the full area of the United States. When a state, county, or watershed is selected, these areas update to represent that more specific locale.

Automatic Data Updates

The data layers used in the app are drawn from sources ranging from the American Community Survey and the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s National Risk Index to the National Water Model and the National Hydrography Dataset. All the data from these sources is available in ArcGIS Living Atlas.

The data in the Drought Aware app is updated every week after the US Drought Monitor map is released. A live feed routine automatically downloads and processes the source data and then updates it in Drought Aware. The population, water, and agriculture summaries in the app are calculated by the live feed routine using the US Drought Monitor map and data source layers in ArcGIS Living Atlas.