Improving NOAA National Weather Service Drought Outlook Products and Services
The NOAA National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center (CPC) produces and delivers operational U.S. drought outlooks for the public. Each month, the National Weather Service issues monthly and seasonal U.S. drought outlooks. These forecasts support drought decision making and situational awareness for national, regional, and state governments and other stakeholders. The outlooks primarily support the agriculture, water resources, fire weather, and emergency management communities.
The current drought outlook maps highlight the change in drought category from the start to the end of the forecast period. These outlooks are deterministic, meaning they provide a single, direct forecast of future drought conditions—such as whether conditions will improve, persist, or worsen—based on expert forecaster assessment rather than a range of statistical probabilities.
NIDIS has been closely collaborating with the National Weather Service to improve its drought outlook products and services to meet user requests for improved drought outlook graphics and new probabilistic drought outlook products. These efforts are grounded in both advancing drought monitoring and prediction science and leveraging design and visualization social science.
This project aims to improve National Weather Service U.S. drought outlook products and services by:
- Developing new probabilistic drought outlooks, including a probabilistic seasonal drought outlook, monthly drought outlook, and flash drought outlook.
- Conducting social science research to improve the understandability and usability of the drought outlooks (both existing deterministic and new probabilistic outlooks). This will result in improved map visualizations that are easier to interpret.
To lay the groundwork for new probabilistic drought outlooks, the National Weather Service team first conducted preliminary research to:
- Automate the production and verification of the U.S. drought outlooks
- Evaluate the subseasonal forecasts that go into the U.S. drought outlooks, assessing how well they predict drought.
For more information, please contact Amanda Sheffield (amanda.sheffield@noaa.gov).
Research Snapshot
Jon Gottschalck and Hailan Wang, NOAA's National Weather Service
What to expect from this research
This multi-year collaboration between NIDIS and the National Weather Service aims to improve the suite of National Weather Service drought outlook products and services. This includes improving existing deterministic drought outlooks, developing new probabilistic drought outlooks, and using social science findings to improve expert and public understanding of these products. These outlook products will provide national and regional users with new and improved official NOAA forecasts of future drought conditions of up to 6 months and facilitate their decision making to prepare for and reduce drought-related impacts.
Publications:
- Joshi, A., M. D. Gerst, S. Sharma, A. Farris, J. Gottschalck, A. Hartman, B. Pugh, A. Sheffield, V. Deheza, and M. A. Kenney. (2026). User-Centered Design and Testing of Drought Forecast Visualizations to Improve Understanding and Decision-Making. Weather, Climate, and Society 18(1): 163–181.
Related Data & Maps
The U.S. Monthly Drought Outlook predicts whether drought will emerge, stay the same or get better over the next 30 days or so.
The U.S. Seasonal Drought Outlook depicts large-scale trends based on subjectively derived probabilities guided by short- and long-range statistical and dynamical forecasts.
