Spain Drought & Water Scarcity Monitor (Sequía/Escasez)

Get Spain's official monthly drought (sequía prolongada) and water scarcity (escasez coyuntural) indicators, per river basin unit (UTS/UTE) and district (demarcación hidrográfica), parsed from the Ministry for the Ecological Transition's (MITECO) "Observatorio Nacional de la Sequía" report into one clean JSON schema.

When should an AI agent use this?

• "What's the current drought status of the Júcar or Segura river basin in Spain?"
• "Which Spanish water scarcity units (UTE) have worsened compared to last month?"
• "Give me the 12-month drought trend for a specific Spanish irrigation district."
• "Is water availability improving or declining in Guadalquivir compared to last month?"
• "List all Spanish river basin districts currently reporting worsening water indicators."
• "Build a risk dashboard for Spanish agri-insurance exposure using official drought data."

What this Actor does

• Automatically finds and downloads the latest monthly report from MITECO's official drought observatory (no manual URL needed — the Actor scrapes the year-overview page itself).
• Parses the official PDF's data tables (not a screenshot/OCR — a real text extraction) into one record per Unidad Territorial de Sequía (UTS, prolonged/meteorological drought) and per Unidad Territorial de Escasez (UTE, conjunctural/demand-related scarcity).
• Also includes the aggregated per-demarcación (river basin district) "GLOBAL SEQUÍA"/"GLOBAL ESCASEZ" indicators.
• Delivers the comparable published monthly series per unit, plus a computed month-over-month trend where available.
• Supports both legacy tables and the new PES format introduced in June 2026. Old and new territorial units are never silently joined.
• Supports accent-insensitive region/basin filters and an optional worsening-only filter.
• Optionally retrieves current official reservoir reserves and preserves report quotations mentioning Alerta/Emergencia in separate downloadable outputs.

Input

Field	Type	Description
incluirSequiaProlongada	boolean	Include the prolonged-drought (UTS) indicator. Default true.
incluirEscasezCoyuntural	boolean	Include the conjunctural-scarcity (UTE) indicator. Default true.
incluirIndicadoresGlobales	boolean	Include the per-basin aggregated GLOBAL SEQUÍA/ESCASEZ indicators. Default true.
regionFilter	string[]	Only return records whose basin district or unit name contains one of these terms (case-insensitive), e.g. ["jucar", "segura"]. Default: none (all of Spain).
maxResults	integer	Maximum number of records to return (1-3000). Default 1000.
reportUrl	string	Advanced: process a specific historical report PDF instead of the latest one. Empty strings use automatic discovery.
soloEmpeoramiento	boolean	Only return comparable month-over-month decreases greater than 0.02. Default false.
incluirReservasEmbalses	boolean	Save current provisional reservoir figures separately in RESERVAS_EMBALSES. Default false.
incluirMencionesEscenarios	boolean	Save source quotations separately in MENCIONES_ESCENARIOS, without classifying units. Default false.

Output

One flat JSON record per UTS/UTE or per-basin global indicator:

{
  "land": "ES",
  "tipo": "escasez_coyuntural",
  "demarcacion": "Júcar",
  "cod": "080.12",
  "unidad": "Marina Baja",
  "indicadorActual": 0.42,
  "mesActual": "2026-05",
  "indicadorMesAnterior": 0.47,
  "tendencia": "empeoramiento",
  "serie12Meses": {
    "2025-06": 0.61,
    "2026-05": 0.42
  },
  "bronDatum": "2026-05",
  "bronUrl": "https://www.miteco.gob.es/.../Informe_SE_jun_2026.pdf",
  "datumOpgehaald": "2026-07-18T12:00:00.000Z"
}

indicadorActual/serie12Meses contain official 0-1 values (higher = wetter/more favorable). The existing serie12Meses field name is retained for compatibility, but it contains only the comparable months actually available, not necessarily twelve. At the June 2026 PES transition, the new codes have only June data: indicadorMesAnterior is null and tendencia is sin_comparacion. No worsening event is charged for missing or non-comparable history. Otherwise trends are mejora, empeoramiento or estable, with a strict 0.02 change threshold. An empty result with soloEmpeoramiento: true can be valid.

Optional enrichment outputs

The Output tab links to separate key-value-store JSON files; enrichment never changes the indicator dataset:

• RESERVAS_EMBALSES: official provisional capacity and reserves in hm³, percentage full, reservoir ID, basin, source URL and its own observation date. The regional filter applies to reservoir and basin names; maxResults independently caps these records. These are current observations even when reportUrl points to an older report. They are not automatically joined to territorial units or historical drought values.
• MENCIONES_ESCENARIOS: verbatim extracted report passages mentioning Alerta/Emergencia, with report date and clasificacionUnidad: false. Quotations preserve negations and historical context; they are report-wide, not region-filtered and not official classifications for every unit.
• RUN_SUMMARY: parsed/matched/delivered counts, truncation, unavailable comparisons, parsing warnings and per-enrichment success/error status. If an optional source is unavailable, the core indicators remain usable and the error is recorded here. Always check this summary before consuming enrichment outputs.

A completely unparseable report now fails instead of producing a misleading successful empty dataset.

Use cases

• Agricultural credit/insurance risk screening for farms in specific Spanish irrigation districts.
• Water infrastructure investment due diligence (desalination, reuse) by basin.
• Portfolio-level water risk monitoring across multiple Spanish regions.
• Feeding a scheduled monitoring pipeline that alerts on worsening drought trends.

Pricing

This Actor uses Apify's Pay-Per-Event (PPE) pricing model.

• Actor Start: $0.00005 (Apify default)
• sequia-indicator-record: $0.004 per delivered UTS/UTE/global indicator record
• alerta-empeoramiento: $0.015 per record whose indicator meaningfully worsened vs. the previous published month

Legal

Data sourced exclusively from official Spanish government publications (Ministerio para la Transición Ecológica y el Reto Demográfico / MITECO). No personal data is processed. Important disclaimer: this Actor delivers the raw official 0-1 drought/scarcity indicator and a computed trend — it does not produce an official Normalidad/Prealerta/Alerta/Emergencia scenario classification, since the exact thresholds for that classification are defined per individual river basin's own Plan Especial de Sequía and are not published as a reusable table in the source report. Do not treat this data as a substitute for the official basin authority's own scenario declarations.

FAQ

Q: Does this include reservoir (embalses) fill levels? A: Yes, opt in with incluirReservasEmbalses. The separate output uses the official MITECO Boletín Hidrológico reservoir service, with its own date and provisional status. No additional enrichment event is charged; normal platform usage costs may apply.

Q: How often is the source updated? A: MITECO publishes this report monthly (roughly one month behind, e.g. a report published in June covers May-end data).

Q: What happens if a report contains an unusual row (e.g. a water-transfer status instead of a numeric indicator)? A: Such rows are skipped with a logged warning rather than silently producing incorrect data — see the Actor's run log.

Q: Why is the tendencia field in Spanish rather than English? A: The people who actually read this data — Spanish farmers, insurers, and water authorities — read Spanish. Values are kept in Spanish rather than translated into a language they'd have to translate back.

---

Palabras clave: sequía España, escasez de agua, MITECO, Observatorio Nacional de la Sequía, indicador de sequía, cuenca hidrográfica, demarcación hidrográfica, restricciones de riego, embalses España.

Keywords

spain, drought, water-scarcity, sequia, escasez, miteco, river-basin, agriculture-risk, insurance-risk, climate-risk, water-data, open-data

Changelog

0.4.0

• Supports new PES tables, decimal points, full territorial codes and wrapped cells while retaining legacy parsing.
• Does not join old and new PES units; unavailable trends are sin_comparacion.
• Adds accent-insensitive filters, soloEmpeoramiento, empty URL handling and explicit parse failure.
• Adds optional official reservoir reserves, contextual scenario quotations and run-quality summaries.
• Worsening-only example tasks now use the actual trend filter.

0.3.0

• Rewrote the Store description/short description (task-first sentence, explicit synonyms, a decision- benefit sentence and a price indication) as part of the agent-readiness pass — no change to parsing logic or output fields. See docs/globale-ideeen/agent-readiness-checklist.md.

0.2.0

• Changed tendencia field values from Dutch to Spanish (mejora/empeoramiento/estable) and renamed serie12Maanden to serie12Meses — this Actor's audience reads Spanish, not Dutch. Renamed the verslechtering-signaal event to alerta-empeoramiento.

0.1.0

• Initial release: sequía prolongada + escasez coyuntural indicators per UTS/UTE and per-basin globals, parsed from the latest monthly MITECO Observatorio report.