Europe experience severe drought last summer. Such conditions need to be monitored and understood especially with regards to agronomical droughts (i.e. soil moisture deficit during essential phenological stages). For this purpose we derived an agronomical drought index from SMOS root zone soil moisture estimates.
This index, based on the water available in the root zone, reflects the anomalies in terms of water availability, from very dry to very wet. The drought index is available globally and since the beginning of SMOS data (i.e., more than 13 years are now available) on a monthly basis. It was prepared by Nitu Ojha at CESBIO.
Figure 1: global drought index for July 2022. Note the droughts in Europe and south America while wet conditions can be detected in Eastern Australia or South Africa.
This data set is freely available from CATDS as detailed below. We are looking forward to receiving your comments and suggestions.
More information is available on
The data are available here, or through ftp
and are identified as
SM_TEST_MIR_CLF4DA_YYYYMMT000000_YYYYMMT235959_VVV_123_7.DBL
with VVV : version number 339 being the latest
YYYY : 4-digit year
MM : 2-digit month
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