Renewable Farming

Quick way to monitor drought, other weather stress in your area

Here’s a link to  the online reports of the relatively new “Quick Drought Response Index“, dubbed QuickDRI by the eight government agencies that cooperated to build the software and database. It’s handy to bookmark this site so you can keep an eye on the multiple weather factors which anticipate crop stress.

July 16, 2017 — It’s much more responsive than the long-used Drought Index which has been available several years.  The link above takes you directly to the time series page of the index, which rolls through the previous 28 weeks of updated maps.  Once on the site, you can navigate to “Home” for a still map for the latest week. We captured the map for July 9, shown below, as an example.  The website has a complete explanation of how to interpret the map. One really interesting aspect of the site: You can click on a time sequence link, and watch successive developments in moisture conditions with an image almost every week.