Drought - Long Term, Projections, Decadal, Global (v3.0)

Technical Description

The global Drought Risk Projection v3 products capture projected risk of drought across the globe using well-established drought monitoring metrics such as Standardized Precipitation and Evaporation Index (SPEI). This risk indicator was computed using the monthly time series of SPEI at six time scale (6-month, 12-month, 18-month, 24-month, 30-month, and 36-month) and applying the relative frequency approach – the ratio of the number of months when the index is below or equal to a threshold indicating drought of moderate magnitude (SPEI < -1) to the total number of possible outcomes, looking at a series of decadal time steps into the future as analysis periods. These products are categorised into short-term and long-term drought blends for different applications. Short-term products are more suited towards vegetative and agricultural drought monitoring, while the long-term products are more suited towards hydrological drought monitoring. These risk maps reflect the future risk from drought across North America at decadal time steps for Shared Socioeconomic Pathway scenarios SSP2-4.5 and SSP5-8.5.

This dataset contains the following fields:

• drought_frequency: Frequencies of drought occurrence at pixel locations over the future time period. This provides frequencies of long-term drought occurrence at pixel locations over the relevant time period. For instance, a 0.5 value for 2050 would indicate that half of the months between 2045 and 2055 are projected to be in drought for that location. This is a value between 0.0 and 1.0.
• drought_risk_class: The drought risk classification for each value. Values are integers from 1 to 5 representing the following classes: Very Low Risk (1), Low Risk (2), Moderate Risk (3), High Risk (4), and Very High Risk (5). Values are categorized using the 44th, 67th, 84th, and 94th percentiles of the
• drought_frequency field, exclusive of '0' values.