Drought

Drought on TerraPulse is organized as a YearLocationdex — a single spine that indexes measured drought severity across every U.S. county, week by week. Each entry is an assessed condition on the ground, not a forecast.

The dexes

Drought lives in a single YearLocationdex:

Rather than one slot per event, the drought dex is a single organizing spine that resolves drought severity by place and time — the weekly U.S. drought classification for each county, building a continuously updated national map. The spine grows as each new weekly assessment is published.

Provenance

Every value traces to the U.S. Drought Monitor (USDM), delivered via NOAA NCEI and the CDC environmental-health tracking pipeline. The USDM is the authoritative weekly drought assessment for the United States, produced from measured precipitation, soil-moisture, and streamflow conditions. That source is registered against the dex, so any record on TerraPulse carries a direct line back to its originating USDM release.

What’s in a record

Each entry carries:

• Location — county and state
• Week — the USDM assessment week
• Severity — drought category from D0 (abnormally dry) through D4 (exceptional drought)
• Extent — the share of the area in each category