This screenshot shows agricultural impacts at all drought levels in Texas during the summer of 2011.By NDMC Communications
The State Impacts section of the U.S. Drought Monitor website is a powerful tool for resource planners, drought impact researchers and more. Recent updates aim to enhance both its user experience and functionality.
The tool uses data from the Drought Impact Reporter and USDM from 2005 to 2023 to show reported drought impacts to each state. Users can filter impacts by drought status, season, weeks in drought, sector, date range and keywords.
Updates to the State Impacts page include:
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Drought impact information through 2023.
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A new feature enabling users to search for more than one USDM level at a time.
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A more user-friendly experience with color-coded filters and search results.
The State Impacts tool builds on static tables, which were first released in 2019, to provide a more complete record of impacts. Every year, NDMC updates State Impacts data by combining DIR records with USDM levels based on the estimated start date for each impact.
Search results list each impact by its title, and clicking on the title brings up the full text of the impact and its source. The State Impacts tool lets users download search results, including the full text of the impact description.
Because an impact may be assigned to multiple locations, it can be associated with numerous locations and multiple USDM levels within a state. The dataset contains one instance of each impact per state for each drought level. This means users could see the same impact at different drought monitor levels, but not the same impact for different counties within a level.
The State Impacts tool does not currently include data from the crowdsourced Condition Monitoring Observer Reports (CMOR).
Learn more: https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/DmData/StateImpacts.aspx.