NOAA's National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS), in partnership with the Southern Regional Climate Center (SRCC), conducted a post-drought assessment of the Southern Plains drought of 2020-2025 to understand the drought’s evolution and impacts (including economic costs) and communicate them to decision-makers across the region, the private sector, and the public. 

Actionable, user-friendly, and reliable information is essential for risk-informed decision-making across the Mississippi River Basin. In response to impacts of drought in the region, NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) built a Mississippi River Basin Drought and Water Dashboard. 

NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) has awarded $1.95 million in funding for projects to support tribal drought resilience as part of President Biden’s Investing in America agenda. This investment will help tribal nations address current and future drought risk on tribal lands across the Western U.S. while informing decision-making and strengthening tribal drought resilience in a changing climate. 

Created through a partnership between researchers at the Desert Research Institute, the University of California Merced, Google, NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS), and other federal partners, Climate Engine allows users to create maps and time series plots for visualizing complex climate data. Now, the team is launching a new publicly accessible platform designed to produce easy to understand,  detailed reports for every Bureau of Land Management state office, district office, field office, and grazing allotment in the contiguous United States.

Increases in atmospheric water demand results in more water being drawn from the land surface into the atmosphere through evaporation and transpiration from plants, which can limit the amount of water available to humans and ecosystems, especially in arid regions where less water is available in the first place. Rsearchers from the Desert Research Institute, with funding from NIDIS, conducted a study to answer three questions: (1) how much has evaporative demand changed across the continental U.S., (2) how consistent are the observed changes among different commonly used datasets, and (3) what climate variables are predominantly driving this change? To do this, they quantified reference evapotranspiration (ETo), which is a standardized measure of evaporative demand that would occur across an idealized and specific well-watered ‘reference’ surface composed of short grass.