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The Drought Monitor was started in spring 1999 in response to a need for improved information about the status of drought across the United States. It serves as an example of interagency cooperation in a time of limited resources. The Drought Monitor process also illustrates the creative use of Internet technologies to disseminate authoritative information about drought and to receive regional…

Recent severe drought events across the nation have raised our concerns over society’s changing and increasing vulnerability to droughts. All levels of governments have taken actions to plan for the slow-onset, long-lasting and spatially extensive drought hazard. The progress of drought planning at the state level is especially impressive over the past decade due to the dramatic growth of drought…

Highlights •A drought risk atlas was created housing over 3000 stations with a 70 year average period of record. •Over 1 billion drought indices records have been generated up through 2012 and are freely available. •When fully completed, will house a cache of more than 500,000 gridded drought indices maps. •A robust web interface allows for multiple data and display…

Interested in the best research from across the field of Geoscience, with our broad scope ensuring that work published reaches the widest possible audience. Understanding the Earth's history and its future evolution is becoming ever more important as the human influence on climate and landscapes, the oceans and the atmosphere expands. Nature Geoscience is a monthly multi…

Drought management is inefficient because feedbacks between drought and people are not fully understood. In this human-influenced era, we need to rethink the concept of drought to include the human role in mitigating and enhancing drought.

The term “flash drought” is currently used in an ambiguous manner in the scientific literature. We recommend that these climate features should be identified based on how rapidly they intensify. Given the increasing use of the term “flash drought” by the media and scientific community, it is prudent to develop a consistent definition that can be used to identify these events and to…