US Drought Monitor County & State Stats: data from the U.S. Drought Monitor (D0-D4, DSCI, Weekly Change)

Get weekly drought levels for every US county or state from U.S. Drought Monitor data in one flat table: percent of area in D0 to D4, the Drought Severity and Coverage Index (DSCI), the change since last week, and the worst category present. No API key, no login. Published by BigSky Data Tools.

NOT FOR SAFETY-CRITICAL USE: data may be delayed or incomplete; not for emergency, regulatory or relief-eligibility decisions; use the official U.S. Drought Monitor (droughtmonitor.unl.edu), produced by the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with USDA and NOAA.

Why use this drought data tool?

• 🗺️ County level for all ~3,200 US counties, or state level, with 5-digit FIPS codes ready to join to your own data.
• 📈 DSCI score (0-500) and week-over-week change on every row, so you can spot where drought is worsening.
• 📅 History back to 2000: one week or 25 years of weekly maps in one run.
• 🎯 Filters: states, specific county FIPS, "only counties in drought (D1+)" and a minimum DSCI.
• 🔁 Schedule it every Thursday after the new map is released and get only the latest week.

How it compares

	This tool	Typical alternatives
Counties per run	All ~3,200 at once, or a filtered set	One area per run, or one state
DSCI score (0-500)	Yes	Not offered
Week-over-week change	Yes	Not offered
Only-in-drought / minimum DSCI filter	Yes	No
History	Since 2000	Since 2000 (some tools)

Who uses it

Crop insurers, farm lenders and ag banks, grain traders, commodity analysts, utilities and hydropower planners, wildfire-risk teams, water districts, land and farmland investors, and researchers.

Input example

{ "level": "county", "states": ["TX", "NE"], "weeksBack": 4, "onlyInDrought": true }

Whole-country latest map: { "level": "county", "weeksBack": 1 }

Output example

{ "level": "county", "mapDate": "2026-10-27", "validEnd": "2026-11-02", "state": "TX",
  "county": "Zavala County", "fips": "48507", "pctNone": 0.0, "pctD0to4": 100.0, "pctD1to4": 100.0,
  "pctD2to4": 90.86, "pctD3to4": 64.57, "pctD4": 16.55, "dsci": 372, "dsciChangeWeek": 0,
  "worstCategory": "D4 Exceptional", "inDrought": true, "sourceUrl": "https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/" }

Percentages are cumulative, as in the Drought Monitor statistics: pctD1to4 is the share of the area in D1 or worse. DSCI = D0-D4 + D1-D4 + D2-D4 + D3-D4 + D4.

Pricing

$7 per 1,000 results ($0.007 per result) plus a $0.01 start fee per run. You pay per row saved (one county or state per week). The latest week for one state is usually well under a dollar; the whole US for one week is about 3,200 rows.

FAQ

Where does the data come from? From the public statistics service of the U.S. Drought Monitor. Credit: The U.S. Drought Monitor is jointly produced by the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the United States Department of Agriculture, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Map courtesy of NDMC. This credit line is included in every row. You are responsible for how you use the data. When is it updated? A new map is released every Thursday, valid as of the previous Tuesday. Is this tool run by the data agency? No. BigSky Data Tools is independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by NDMC, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USDA, NOAA or NASA.