Now On-Line, for Your Convenience:

U.S. Drought Monitor Shapefiles Archived

Shapefiles for the U.S. Drought Monitor (USDM) back through 2001 are now archived on the USDM web site as “GIS Data” at http://drought.unl.edu/dm/dmshps_archive.htm. In addition to actual shapefiles, which was originally a proprietary file format developed by the Environmental Systems Research Institute, the archive provides KML files, the Google Earth format; GML files, using Geographic Markup Language, which works on a variety of GIS platforms; and OGC Web Mapping Services, which provide georeferenced map images to a variety of clients. If you have questions about USDM GIS Data, please contact Soren Scott, NDMC GIS Specialist, via email to sscott5@unl.edu, or by calling 402-472-6717.

U.S. Drought Monitor Forum Presentations On-Line

Couldn’t Make Bismarck? Presentations Available On-Line:

http://drought.unl.edu/news/listensession-ND2007.html

User feedback, collected via listening sessions, email, conversations, and any other means feasible, are an integral part of fine tuning our drought monitoring tools to be accurate and as useful as possible. These tools are being developed with sponsorship from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Risk Management Agency, in partnership with the Computer Science & Engineering Department of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

If you’re interested in helping us fine-tune or ground truth products to make them as accurate and useful as possible, you can contact Meghan Sittler, NDMC Research & Outreach Specialist, 402-472-2712, msittler2@unl.edu, and let us know more about your interest.

Southeast Drought Brings Media to NDMC

The Raleigh, N.C., News & Observer has created an innovative, animated map using the U.S.
Drought Monitor to link drought and declining reservoir levels. Go see:
http://www.newsobserver.com/1181/story/745683.html

NDMC drought-trackers have fielded more media calls than usual due to the intense drought currently in the Southeastern United States. Our climatologists’ comments have been incorporated into broadcasts on “Talk of the Nation,” “Morning Edition,” “The Diane Rehm Show,” “The Lou Dobbs Show,” and the “NBC Nightly News,” and into articles in The New York Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Sacramento Bee, and The Miami Herald, among others. We were also featured in a recent History Channel show, “Mega Drought,” part of the “Mega Disasters” series.

Back to DroughtScape Winter 2008