Query historical percent-area-in-drought statistics for a state or county from the U.S. Drought Monitor web services
domain: usdmdataservices.unl.edu · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Build a request URL against usdmdataservices.unl.edu specifying the area type (state/county/HUC), statistics type, and area-of-interest (aoi) code.
Add startdate and enddate parameters to bound the query to the desired weekly reporting period(s), since the USDM is published weekly (typically Thursdays).
Choose between total-area and percent-area statistics endpoints, and optionally set minimum/maximum drought category thresholds (D0-D4).
For mapping needs, use the separate GIS data downloads (shapefile/KMZ/WMS) rather than the tabular statistics service.
Parse the returned JSON/CSV records keyed by week and drought category.
Known gotchas
The Drought Monitor is a weekly product, not real-time — requesting sub-weekly granularity will not return finer data than what's published each Thursday.
Endpoint URL structure differs by area type (state vs. county vs. HUC watershed) — a request built for one area type won't work unmodified for another.
Drought category thresholds (D0-D4) are cumulative severity categories, not mutually exclusive buckets — percent-area figures for D2 include areas also in D3/D4 unless an exact-category filter is applied.
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