United States Drought Status Dataset

354,705

Observations

255

Series

Subjects

2000–2026

Period covered

What this looks like

One real series from the dataset, and real rows from the head of its published extract. Neither is a mock-up: the rows below are the same rows, unchanged, that are in the file you would download.

Abnormally dry or worse, share of area at United States

The longest single series this dataset holds — 1,391 weekly values, one of 255. Drawn from 600 of them, evenly spaced across the record. The dataset is not this chart.

Drawn to show the shape and resolution of what the dataset contains, not to make a point about United States. Gaps are breaks, never interpolated.

View the data behind this chart

240 of 320 periods, evenly spaced across the record. Every value is in the download and the API; a table of all 320 would be longer than this page and unusable with a screen reader.
Period	United States (%)
2000	42.7
2000.0833333333333	53.5
2000.25	37.8
2000.3333333333333	39.8
2000.4166666666667	37.0
2000.5833333333333	41.7
2000.6666666666667	47.9
2000.75	50.6
2000.9166666666667	27.8
2001	26.7
2001.0833333333333	31.3
2001.25	32.0
2001.3333333333333	39.7
2001.4166666666667	33.3
2001.5833333333333	41.0
2001.6666666666667	42.6
2001.75	37.0
2001.9166666666667	46.8
2002	44.7
2002.0833333333333	48.2
2002.25	54.7
2002.3333333333333	53.9
2002.4166666666667	57.3
2002.5833333333333	65.9
2002.6666666666667	60.9
2002.75	59.5
2002.9166666666667	51.4
2003	48.5
2003.0833333333333	53.3
2003.25	55.3
2003.3333333333333	54.2
2003.4166666666667	50.0
2003.5833333333333	49.8
2003.6666666666667	52.7
2003.75	50.7
2003.9166666666667	50.7
2004	51.7
2004.0833333333333	48.0
2004.25	50.0
2004.3333333333333	49.3
2004.4166666666667	49.0
2004.5833333333333	47.4
2004.6666666666667	39.6
2004.75	43.4
2004.9166666666667	32.9
2005	33.3
2005.0833333333333	32.7
2005.25	30.6
2005.3333333333333	37.1
2005.4166666666667	37.6
2005.5833333333333	43.5
2005.6666666666667	42.5
2005.75	35.7
2005.9166666666667	39.4
2006	37.5
2006.0833333333333	40.3
2006.25	46.9
2006.3333333333333	47.3
2006.4166666666667	48.5
2006.5833333333333	53.4
2006.6666666666667	51.0
2006.75	45.8
2006.9166666666667	40.0
2007	42.4
2007.0833333333333	43.3
2007.25	47.9
2007.3333333333333	45.6
2007.4166666666667	48.0
2007.5833333333333	59.3
2007.6666666666667	53.8
2007.75	52.6
2007.9166666666667	51.9
2008	52.2
2008.0833333333333	51.8
2008.25	43.5
2008.3333333333333	44.1
2008.4166666666667	38.4
2008.5833333333333	44.6
2008.6666666666667	40.4
2008.75	42.3
2008.9166666666667	43.5
2009	38.8
2009.0833333333333	43.0
2009.25	39.0
2009.3333333333333	34.0
2009.4166666666667	30.8
2009.5833333333333	33.6
2009.6666666666667	29.2
2009.75	26.5
2009.9166666666667	23.6
2010	28.1
2010.0833333333333	29.2
2010.25	33.1
2010.3333333333333	28.1
2010.4166666666667	29.3
2010.5833333333333	24.5
2010.6666666666667	27.5
2010.75	36.5
2010.9166666666667	38.6
2011	36.5
2011.0833333333333	41.7
2011.25	34.4
2011.3333333333333	31.0
2011.4166666666667	31.3
2011.5833333333333	39.8
2011.6666666666667	37.9
2011.75	37.7
2011.9166666666667	34.1
2012	45.0
2012.0833333333333	47.8
2012.25	51.0
2012.3333333333333	49.7
2012.4166666666667	60.6
2012.5833333333333	70.2
2012.6666666666667	69.6
2012.75	69.0
2012.9166666666667	69.4
2013	71.4
2013.0833333333333	65.3
2013.25	62.9
2013.3333333333333	55.8
2013.5	51.9
2013.5833333333333	56.7
2013.6666666666667	59.2
2013.8333333333333	51.4
2013.9166666666667	48.9
2014	47.1
2014.1666666666667	46.0
2014.25	44.7
2014.3333333333333	40.3
2014.5	37.2
2014.5833333333333	39.8
2014.6666666666667	38.5
2014.8333333333333	39.1
2014.9166666666667	41.6
2015	37.4
2015.1666666666667	49.5
2015.25	55.0
2015.3333333333333	50.7
2015.5	39.4
2015.5833333333333	49.5
2015.6666666666667	49.9
2015.8333333333333	44.0
2015.9166666666667	31.1
2016	28.1
2016.1666666666667	30.8
2016.25	36.6
2016.3333333333333	32.1
2016.5	40.7
2016.5833333333333	46.2
2016.6666666666667	36.9
2016.8333333333333	42.4
2016.9166666666667	46.8
2017	34.8
2017.1666666666667	32.6
2017.25	30.0
2017.3333333333333	18.0
2017.5	24.5
2017.5833333333333	32.0
2017.6666666666667	31.0
2017.8333333333333	27.5
2017.9166666666667	39.9
2018	48.4
2018.1666666666667	47.8
2018.25	37.5
2018.3333333333333	37.5
2018.5	42.0
2018.5833333333333	46.2
2018.6666666666667	42.9
2018.8333333333333	30.3
2018.9166666666667	28.8
2019	26.9
2019.1666666666667	23.2
2019.25	16.3
2019.3333333333333	9.32
2019.5	19.6
2019.5833333333333	25.3
2019.6666666666667	29.8
2019.8333333333333	25.0
2019.9166666666667	24.7
2020	21.2
2020.1666666666667	20.8
2020.25	21.4
2020.3333333333333	29.9
2020.5	41.6
2020.5833333333333	46.5
2020.6666666666667	52.9
2020.8333333333333	55.8
2020.9166666666667	57.7
2021	55.7
2021.1666666666667	61.3
2021.25	58.5
2021.3333333333333	54.6
2021.5	50.9
2021.5833333333333	50.4
2021.6666666666667	49.0
2021.8333333333333	52.6
2021.9166666666667	60.4
2022	60.1
2022.1666666666667	61.6
2022.25	55.2
2022.3333333333333	54.1
2022.5	66.1
2022.5833333333333	55.5
2022.6666666666667	53.5
2022.8333333333333	68.5
2022.9166666666667	65.0
2023	58.2
2023.1666666666667	45.9
2023.25	39.5
2023.3333333333333	38.1
2023.5	41.6
2023.5833333333333	44.3
2023.6666666666667	43.8
2023.8333333333333	46.4
2023.9166666666667	46.5
2024	44.9
2024.1666666666667	38.3
2024.25	34.5
2024.3333333333333	23.5
2024.5	41.4
2024.5833333333333	44.7
2024.6666666666667	58.4
2024.8333333333333	69.5
2024.9166666666667	58.7
2025	52.7
2025.1666666666667	58.2
2025.25	50.7
2025.3333333333333	46.3
2025.5	43.0
2025.5833333333333	45.1
2025.6666666666667	50.0
2025.8333333333333	56.7
2025.9166666666667	55.5
2026	59.1
2026.1666666666667	65.9
2026.25	67.7
2026.3333333333333	63.5
2026.5	57.9
2026.5833333333333	63.1

Sample rows

12 of 354,705 rows Taken from the start of observations-drought-us-drought-monitor.csv. These are sample rows, not the dataset.

Sample rows from the United States Drought Status Dataset extract
`metric_id`	`subject_id`	`subject_kind`	`value`	`censored`	`censor_operator`	`censor_threshold`	`censor_limit`	`censor_reported`	`unit`	`period_start`	`period_end`	`period_kind`	`basis`	`confidence`	`source_id`	`source_ref`	`qualifier`	`superseded`	`retrieved`
drought-area-abnormally-dry	country-usa	geography	42.71	—	—	—	—	—	%	2000-01-04	—	week	reported	high	us-drought-monitor	US Drought Monitor, the United States including Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, D0 or worse by area	—	—	2026-08-31
drought-area-abnormally-dry	country-usa	geography	51.73	—	—	—	—	—	%	2000-01-11	—	week	reported	high	us-drought-monitor	US Drought Monitor, the United States including Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, D0 or worse by area	—	—	2026-08-31
drought-area-abnormally-dry	country-usa	geography	56.74	—	—	—	—	—	%	2000-01-18	—	week	reported	high	us-drought-monitor	US Drought Monitor, the United States including Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, D0 or worse by area	—	—	2026-08-31
drought-area-abnormally-dry	country-usa	geography	57.97	—	—	—	—	—	%	2000-01-25	—	week	reported	high	us-drought-monitor	US Drought Monitor, the United States including Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, D0 or worse by area	—	—	2026-08-31
drought-area-abnormally-dry	country-usa	geography	54.4	—	—	—	—	—	%	2000-02-01	—	week	reported	high	us-drought-monitor	US Drought Monitor, the United States including Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, D0 or worse by area	—	—	2026-08-31
drought-area-abnormally-dry	country-usa	geography	53.5	—	—	—	—	—	%	2000-02-08	—	week	reported	high	us-drought-monitor	US Drought Monitor, the United States including Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, D0 or worse by area	—	—	2026-08-31
drought-area-abnormally-dry	country-usa	geography	52.83	—	—	—	—	—	%	2000-02-15	—	week	reported	high	us-drought-monitor	US Drought Monitor, the United States including Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, D0 or worse by area	—	—	2026-08-31
drought-area-abnormally-dry	country-usa	geography	47.41	—	—	—	—	—	%	2000-02-22	—	week	reported	high	us-drought-monitor	US Drought Monitor, the United States including Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, D0 or worse by area	—	—	2026-08-31
drought-area-abnormally-dry	country-usa	geography	45.65	—	—	—	—	—	%	2000-02-29	—	week	reported	high	us-drought-monitor	US Drought Monitor, the United States including Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, D0 or worse by area	—	—	2026-08-31
drought-area-abnormally-dry	country-usa	geography	45.27	—	—	—	—	—	%	2000-03-07	—	week	reported	high	us-drought-monitor	US Drought Monitor, the United States including Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, D0 or worse by area	—	—	2026-08-31
drought-area-abnormally-dry	country-usa	geography	40.56	—	—	—	—	—	%	2000-03-14	—	week	reported	high	us-drought-monitor	US Drought Monitor, the United States including Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, D0 or worse by area	—	—	2026-08-31
drought-area-abnormally-dry	country-usa	geography	40.26	—	—	—	—	—	%	2000-03-21	—	week	reported	high	us-drought-monitor	US Drought Monitor, the United States including Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, D0 or worse by area	—	—	2026-08-31

Download these rows as CSV — the same twelve, with the column header, for testing a loader before committing to the full file.

Methodology

Collected from the United States Drought Monitor, produced weekly by the National Drought Mitigation Center with the Department of Agriculture and NOAA. A rotating author combines precipitation, soil moisture, streamflow, reservoir and snowpack indicators with reports from a network of local observers and draws the map; that judgement is what distinguishes it from any computed index. The published shares are cumulative by design — the figure for a category includes every area in a more severe one — and Hydrionis stores them as published rather than converting them into exact bands, because converting would put a Hydrionis-computed number under a name readers know from the publisher. The national request answers with two areas for every week, the contiguous states and the whole country including Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico; the area is named in the request rather than inferred, and the whole country is the one stored against the United States.

What this dataset cannot tell you

Read before relying on these figures

An assessment, not a measurement and not a legal declaration. A category on the map is not a statement that any authority has declared a drought or imposed a water restriction; those are separate acts by separate bodies, and Hydrionis holds neither.
The categories are cumulative as published. Read as exact-category shares they understate every drought — a state 40% in extreme drought and 9% in exceptional is 40% in extreme-or-worse, not 49%.
This is a share of land area, which is not a share of people, farmland or water supply. A state can be most of the way into drought by area with most of its population unaffected.
The map is drawn by an author each week using judgement. That is its strength over a single index and it also means it is not reproducible from any formula, and two authors need not have drawn the same line.
Hydrionis does not derive a drought status of its own and nothing in its calculated indices should be read as one.

Coverage

Subjects	The United States and each of the fifty states — 51 held
Period	2000–2026
Units	%
Update cadence	Weekly
Identifier	`us-drought-status` v1.0.0

Fields

Data dictionary →

Every metric this dataset carries, with the unit it is stored in and the geography level it is reported at. Full definitions are in the data dictionary.

Identifier	Field	Unit	Reported at
`drought-area-abnormally-dry`	Abnormally dry or worse, share of area The share of an area assessed by the United States Drought Monitor as being in D0 conditions or any more severe category.	%	country, region
`drought-area-moderate`	Moderate drought or worse, share of area The share of an area assessed by the United States Drought Monitor as being in D1 conditions or any more severe category.	%	country, region
`drought-area-severe`	Severe drought or worse, share of area The share of an area assessed by the United States Drought Monitor as being in D2 conditions or any more severe category.	%	country, region
`drought-area-extreme`	Extreme drought or worse, share of area The share of an area assessed by the United States Drought Monitor as being in D3 conditions or any more severe category.	%	country, region
`drought-area-exceptional`	Exceptional drought or worse, share of area The share of an area assessed by the United States Drought Monitor as being in D4 conditions or any more severe category.	%	country, region

Rights and access

Licence position

Open. Derivative use true; redistribution true; commercial reuse true.

Applies to material authored by US federal agencies. Third-party material carried within a federal product may be separately protected.

Permitted uses

Public display
Derived analysis
API delivery
Bulk download
Commercial use

Available to: Public, Developer, Research, Professional, Enterprise. These follow from the rights of the contributing publishers, not from a Hydrionis pricing decision — no access tier can widen what a publisher withheld.

Contributing sources

National Drought Mitigation Center, United States Department of Agriculture and NOAA — United States Drought Monitor — weekly drought status by area (US Government work — public domain)

Attribution and citation

Cite and reuse →

Two different obligations, deliberately kept apart. One is a condition of somebody else's licence; the other is a request Hydrionis has no standing to enforce.

Suggested citation for Hydrionis

Hydrionis (2026), United States Drought Status Dataset, version 1.0.0, accessed 2026-09-02, hydrionis.com/data/datasets/us-drought-status/

Cite Hydrionis where you rely on the compilation, the normalisation, the eligibility judgements or a chart. Where you use an unmodified published value, the publisher’s attribution is the one that is required; crediting Hydrionis as well is welcome and is not something Hydrionis can require of you.

Recommended, not required. Hydrionis does not claim rights over unmodified public data it relayed, and doing arithmetic on somebody else’s measurements does not make them Hydrionis’s. Cite the version and the access date: United States Drought Status Dataset changes as publishers release and as methods are revised, and a citation without both cannot be checked later. Full guidance is on cite and reuse.

None of the contributing licences requires attribution. Crediting the publishers is still good practice and they are listed above.

Changelog

Version 1.0.0 — 2026-08-31

First release: official drought status, held apart from the calculated indices.

Additions

Weekly area in each Drought Monitor category for the United States and all fifty states, from January 2000.
Fifty state geographies, which Hydrionis did not previously hold.

Use this data

Download drought observations from US Drought Monitor (354,705 rows) (CSV)
Machine-readable JSON /api/v1/datasets/us-drought-status.json
How to cite this, and who you must credit
How these figures were produced
Request this at a different scale, format or geography

Every bulk extract ships with a companion metadata file carrying this dataset’s version, its sources, their licences, the attribution you are required to give and the suggested citation — so the terms travel with the file rather than staying on this page.

About this data

The fields a professional user needs to judge whether this is fit for a particular purpose. Deliberately not a score.

About this data

Everything below is a property of the data rather than a rating of it. There is deliberately no single confidence score: how much a gap matters depends on what you are about to do with the series, and only you know that.

Source	National Drought Mitigation Center, United States Department of Agriculture and NOAA — United States Drought Monitor — weekly drought status by area · US Government work — public domain
How the values came to exist	Mixed across the series — the basis is recorded on every individual value.
Period held	2000–2026
Known gaps	An assessment, not a measurement and not a legal declaration. A category on the map is not a statement that any authority has declared a drought or imposed a water restriction; those are separate acts by separate bodies, and Hydrionis holds neither. The categories are cumulative as published. Read as exact-category shares they understate every drought — a state 40% in extreme drought and 9% in exceptional is 40% in extreme-or-worse, not 49%. This is a share of land area, which is not a share of people, farmland or water supply. A state can be most of the way into drought by area with most of its population unaffected.
Continuity	Version 1.0.0, released 2026-08-31. 1 recorded version; breaking changes and corrections are listed in the changelog above.
Last read from the publisher	2026-08-31 · publisher updates weekly
Redistribution	Permitted by the upstream licences
Commercial reuse	Permitted by the upstream licences. No Hydrionis access tier can widen this.
Methodology	How this was produced