US Drought Monitor Texas Weekly Records

Export US Drought Monitor Texas weekly records for recurring agricultural and water-risk reporting. Choose Texas statewide, supplied Texas county FIPS codes, or both, and an inclusive report-date range. Get official cumulative drought area percentages as typed dataset rows, ready for CSV, Excel or JSON export.

What does this Actor do?

The Actor downloads official anonymous USDM CSV exports from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln data service. Each row describes one weekly report for one geography. It preserves report date, None and D0–D4 percentages, validity dates, county name when applicable, and the source request URL.

It does not create maps, forecasts, alerts, recommendations or a persistent change history. It uses no AI and requires no source account, cookies, paid API subscription or proxy.

Who is it for?

• Agricultural analysts comparing county drought exposure across reporting weeks.
• Water-risk teams refreshing a dated spreadsheet or internal dashboard.
• Researchers building a Texas historical drought time series.
• Reporting teams that need reproducible geography/date-indexed records rather than copying values from maps.

Why use this Actor?

The useful work is turning the official export into a predictable dataset contract: exact Texas scope, validated FIPS, typed percentages, duplicate removal and explicit date boundaries. The source sometimes includes a week outside the requested range because its validity period overlaps that range. This Actor filters by report date instead, so a January report-date request does not silently include December reports.

Getting started

1. Leave Include Texas statewide enabled for statewide records.
2. Optionally enter county FIPS codes, for example 48453 for Travis County.
3. Enter start and end dates as YYYY-MM-DD, or omit them for the trailing 30 days.
4. Set the global maximum number of records.
5. Run, inspect the dataset and export the required format.

{
  "includeState": true,
  "countyFips": ["48453"],
  "startDate": "2026-01-01",
  "endDate": "2026-01-31",
  "maxItems": 1000
}

That example returns four January 2026 reports for Texas and four for Travis County: eight rows, not one row per calendar day.

Input parameters

Field	Default	Behavior
includeState	true	Include Texas statewide records first.
countyFips	[]	Exact five-digit Texas county codes; deduplicated in input order.
startDate	30 days before end	Inclusive report-date boundary, earliest 2000-01-04.
endDate	Today UTC	Inclusive report-date boundary, not a forecast date.
maxItems	1000	Global accepted-row cap, integer 1–10000. Zero is invalid.

With includeState:false, supply at least one county code. Only Texas counties are supported; county names, arbitrary URLs and other states are rejected. Dates must be valid, ordered and not in the future. Omitted startDate is calculated relative to the supplied/default endDate.

Ordering and limits

Statewide records come first, then counties in supplied order. Within each geography, reports are newest first. Requests are split by calendar year to bound response size. maxItems applies across the whole run, not per county or year. Reaching it may omit older reports and later counties. To focus on county history, disable statewide output and choose a sufficiently large cap.

There is no cross-run deduplication: scheduled snapshots may contain the same report again. Use fips plus reportDate as your downstream upsert key. A legitimate range with no report dates produces an empty dataset. Unexpected responses and exhausted request failures fail the run rather than pretending an empty result is successful.

Extracted fields

Field	Meaning
reportDate	Weekly map/report date, YYYY-MM-DD.
geographyType	state or county.
state	Always TX.
fips	State 48 or the five-digit county FIPS.
county	Official county name, null for statewide rows.
none	Percentage of area with no drought classification.
d0	Area percentage at D0 or worse, abnormally dry or worse.
d1	Area percentage at D1 or worse, moderate drought or worse.
d2	Area percentage at D2 or worse, severe drought or worse.
d3	Area percentage at D3 or worse, extreme drought or worse.
d4	Area percentage at D4, exceptional drought.
validStart, validEnd	Official validity dates.
statisticsType	Always cumulative.
sourceUrl	Official CSV request URL with date/geography parameters.
scrapedAt	UTC retrieval timestamp.

Do not sum D0–D4. These are overlapping cumulative percentages, not mutually exclusive categories. For example, D3 area also belongs to D2, D1 and D0. Values are source-reported percentages, not population, acreage or parcel-level risk measurements.

Output example

Values below are from the official Travis County report for January 27, 2026.

{
  "reportDate": "2026-01-27",
  "geographyType": "county",
  "state": "TX",
  "fips": "48453",
  "county": "Travis County",
  "none": 0,
  "d0": 100,
  "d1": 100,
  "d2": 99.97,
  "d3": 71.25,
  "d4": 0,
  "validStart": "2026-01-27",
  "validEnd": "2026-02-02",
  "statisticsType": "cumulative",
  "sourceUrl": "https://usdmdataservices.unl.edu/api/CountyStatistics/GetDroughtSeverityStatisticsByAreaPercent?aoi=48453&startdate=1%2F1%2F2026&enddate=1%2F31%2F2026&statisticsType=1",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-26T21:00:00.000Z"
}

How much does it cost to export Texas drought records?

Pay per event: $0.001 per run start, plus a per-record charge. One accepted weekly geography row is one item event. Invalid, duplicate and out-of-range rows have no item charge. Requests and retries have no separate event charge.

Store spend tier	Per weekly record
FREE	$0.0036064
BRONZE	$0.003136
SILVER	$0.0024461
GOLD	$0.0018816
PLATINUM	$0.0018816
DIAMOND	$0.0018816

At BRONZE, estimated Actor charges are $0.026088 for eight records, $0.3146 for 100 records and $3.137 for 1000 records, including one start event. Empty successful requests still incur the start charge. Spend tiers refer to qualifying aggregate monthly Apify Store spending, not volume with this Actor alone. Check current Store pricing before running. Estimates are not guaranteed invoices; account/platform terms also apply. Refunds, disputes, fraud, taxes, corrections and contractual clawbacks can affect revenue or payouts; no payout is promised.

Integrations

Schedule a trailing-window run weekly and upsert the dataset into a spreadsheet or database using (fips, reportDate). A small overlapping window helps capture official revisions without treating repeated weeks as new observations. Use Apify dataset exports or your existing Make, Zapier or webhook workflow to move rows into reporting systems. These downstream integrations are user-configured, not built-in alerts or automatic change detection.

API usage

Start one asynchronous run and retain its run ID. Poll that same run until terminal status; only read its dataset as complete after SUCCEEDED.

curl -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"startDate":"2026-01-01","endDate":"2026-01-31","maxItems":100}' \
  'https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/automation-lab~us-drought-monitor-texas-records/runs'

JavaScript with the official client:

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';
const client = new ApifyClient({ token: process.env.APIFY_TOKEN });
const run = await client.actor('automation-lab/us-drought-monitor-texas-records')
    .call({ countyFips: ['48453'], maxItems: 100 });
if (run.status !== 'SUCCEEDED') throw new Error(run.status);
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems({ limit: 100 });
console.log(items);

Python:

import os
from apify_client import ApifyClient
client = ApifyClient(os.environ['APIFY_TOKEN'])
run = client.actor('automation-lab/us-drought-monitor-texas-records').call(
    run_input={'countyFips': ['48453'], 'maxItems': 100})
if run['status'] != 'SUCCEEDED':
    raise RuntimeError(run['status'])
rows = client.dataset(run['defaultDatasetId']).list_items(limit=100).items
print(rows)

MCP: Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor and VS Code

Use this Actor-scoped endpoint, not an unqualified tool collection:

claude mcp add --transport http apify \
  "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=automation-lab/us-drought-monitor-texas-records"

Claude Desktop and Cursor MCP JSON configuration (use the client's supported HTTP transport and Apify authentication flow):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=automation-lab/us-drought-monitor-texas-records"
    }
  }
}

VS Code uses the corresponding HTTP server entry under servers in .vscode/mcp.json:

{
  "servers": {
    "apify": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=automation-lab/us-drought-monitor-texas-records"
    }
  }
}

Example prompt: “Export Travis County weekly drought percentages for January 2026, excluding statewide rows, at most 10 records. Explain cumulative D0–D4 and show the report dates.”

Discover actual names and arguments using read-only tools/list. Actor selection also exposes run/data helper tools; it is not exactly one tool. An authorized invocation should start once, retain run and storage IDs, then follow the same run with get-actor-run, bounded backoff (2, 4, 8, then at most 10 seconds) and a 120-second total deadline. Server waits may end before completion. A timeout is not permission to restart. If still pending, report its ID and stop.

After success, use get-dataset-items with explicit offset, limit and fields. Example consumer budget: 20 source rows per page, at most 100 rows and 64 KiB serialized UTF-8 admitted to model context, whichever comes first. Enforce bytes host-side, report truncation and next offset, and leave full exports in storage. If the client cannot enforce bytes before model injection, do not claim that guarantee. IDs are metadata, not result rows. Failures may have partial output. No universal token-saving claim is made.

FAQ and troubleshooting

Transient network errors, HTTP 429 and 5xx responses receive at most three total attempts per request. Each request has a 30-second timeout and bounded backoff. Other HTTP failures and unexpected CSV shapes fail closed. Upstream outages can still interrupt long histories; any dataset already written is partial when the run fails. Narrow the input or retry after the source recovers, not repeatedly during an outage.

Why did I get zero rows? The interval may contain no weekly report dates. A single non-report day is a valid empty range.

Why are some counties missing? The global cap may have been reached by statewide or earlier county records. Increase it or request counties separately.

Why do the drought percentages exceed 100 when summed? They are cumulative overlapping severity thresholds; do not sum them.

Can I request categorical statistics or another state? No. This product intentionally supports only cumulative Texas area percentages.

Legality, responsible use and source attribution

Source: U.S. Drought Monitor, produced through the NDMC, USDA, NOAA and NASA partnership. Consult official source guidance and attribution requirements when redistributing records. This independent automation is not affiliated with or endorsed by those organizations. It uses Apify standard user terms and adds no custom license restrictions. Public availability does not remove your responsibility for lawful downstream use. These data are not site-specific agricultural, insurance or financial advice.

Data handling and support

Only public aggregate drought statistics and user-supplied public date/FIPS filters are processed. No source login, personal records or AI provider is used. Apify stores run input, logs and datasets under your account's storage/retention controls; this Actor creates no persistent named cache. Delete datasets, key-value stores and runs through Apify as appropriate; platform backups follow Apify policy rather than a deletion guarantee from this Actor.

Failed operations send sanitized diagnostic input, exceptions and actor/build/run IDs to our private GlitchTip service for repair. Secret fields and URL query strings are removed; diagnostic reports are retained for 30 days. No raw upstream response body or credential is intentionally logged. For bugs or questions, open an issue on the Actor's Apify page with a run link and non-sensitive expected behavior.

Related Actors

For complementary current weather warnings, see US Active Weather Alerts Tracker. Weekly drought coverage is a separate dataset from short-term NWS warnings; this Actor does not combine them or issue alerts.