European Drought Monitor (EDO — Combined Drought Indicator)

Get the official European drought status for any GPS location in Europe, straight from the European Drought Observatory (EDO) of the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (run by the EU Joint Research Centre). The actor reads the Combined Drought Indicator (CDI v4.1) — EDO's headline 5 km Europe-wide drought classification — and returns the current drought class (watch / warning / alert / recovery / no drought), normalized into a clean per-location schema.

When should an AI agent use this?

• "What is the current drought status for Utrecht, the Netherlands?"
• "Which of these European farm locations are under an EDO drought alert right now?"
• "Give me the current drought severity for a list of cities for an agri-insurance risk check."
• "Has the EDO Combined Drought Indicator worsened to warning or alert near this municipality?"
• "Compare drought conditions between several European regions using one consistent index."

What this Actor does

• Queries EDO's key-free WCS (Web Coverage Service) and downloads the Combined Drought Indicator GeoTIFF grid for a small window around each requested point (no API key, no login).
• Reads the GeoTIFF georeferencing and samples the exact ~5 km pixel at each lat/lon — robust even when EDO slightly resamples the window, because the actor re-reads the returned ModelTiepoint/ModelPixelScale.
• Classifies each location into EDO's CDI classes and maps them onto a normalized drought-level vocabulary.
• Returns the raw EDO classification code alongside the readable label, so no source information is lost.
• Supports an optional historical date (YYYY-MM-DD) and up to 500 locations in a single run.

Input

Field	Type	Description
locaties	array	GPS points to evaluate: { lat, lon, naam? }. Min 1, max 500.
datum	string (optional)	Historical date YYYY-MM-DD (EDO has ~10-day updates). Empty = latest available.

Output

One flat JSON record per requested location:

{
  "naam": "Utrecht",
  "lat": 52.09,
  "lon": 5.12,
  "droogteniveau": "dreigend_watertekort",
  "cdi": {
    "classificatieCode": 1,
    "klasse": "watch",
    "domein": "neerslagtekort",
    "toelichting": "Watch: neerslagtekort (meteorologische droogte)."
  },
  "bron": "European Drought Observatory (Copernicus CEMS) — Combined Drought Indicator v4.1",
  "bronDatum": null,
  "datumOpgehaald": "2026-08-04T17:10:00.000Z",
  "bronUrl": "https://drought.emergency.copernicus.eu/api/wcs?..."
}

CDI class mapping

classificatieCode	klasse	droogteniveau	Meaning (EDO domain)
0	no_drought	normaal	No drought
1	watch	dreigend_watertekort	Precipitation deficit (meteorological drought)
2	warning	watertekort	Soil-moisture deficit
3	alert	crisis	Vegetation deficit / impact
4	recovery	herstel	Recovering after earlier drought
5 / 6	other	onbekend	Rare EDO v4.1 codes; returned as raw code (see Legal)
(geen data)	no_data	onbekend	Point outside EDO coverage or fetch failed (see WARNINGS); classificatieCode is null and the location is not charged

Use cases

• Agriculture / food-security risk — flag farm locations currently under CDI alert.
• Insurance & credit risk — drought-state aggregation across a book of locations.
• Climate-risk dashboards — a single, consistent pan-European drought index instead of per-country sources.
• Site selection — compare drought pressure between candidate regions in one call.

Pricing

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

• Actor Start: $0.00005 (Apify default)
• droogte-status: $0.004 per location with valid CDI data (no charge when no data is available)

Legal

Data is sourced exclusively from the official European Drought Observatory (EDO), a service of the Copernicus Emergency Management System run by the EU Joint Research Centre (JRC). It is EU public open data, key-free, and contains no personal data (only environmental classification per grid cell).

Important disclaimers:

• This actor reports EDO's latest known official CDI classification — it does not forecast future drought or issue its own drought warnings.
• CDI classes 1–3 (watch/warning/alert) were verified by the developer against EDO's own map legend and the JRC monthly drought analyses. EDO v4.1 also uses codes 5 and 6, which appear in a minority of cells (observed e.g. in parts of Poland and Scandinavia) and are not unambiguously documented as a single class; the actor returns those as other with the raw code preserved so no information is lost.
• The JRC itself notes it is currently investigating soil-moisture model issues that can make the CDI less reliable in some regions (notably western Russia and the eastern hydrology domain). Treat the result as indicative and cross-check with national authorities for high-stakes decisions.

FAQ

Q: Which exact indicator does this use? A: The EDO Combined Drought Indicator (CDI v4.1) on EDO's standard 5 km (0.0417°) grid, covering Europe.

Q: Can I get the SPI (precipitation), soil-moisture or low-flow indicators too? A: Not in v1. In EDO's public services, CDI is available as a clean machine-readable GeoTIFF without a key. EDO's other indicators (soil-moisture anomaly, low-flow index) are currently only served as styled map layers, and the SPI coverage is coarse/categorical. The CDI's watch/warning/alert classes map directly onto precipitation / soil-moisture / vegetation deficits. More indicators are a possible future version.

Q: How fresh is the data? A: EDO updates roughly every 10 days. Without datum, the actor uses EDO's latest available update.

Q: What if a location has no EDO data? A: The record is still returned with cdi.klasse: "no_data", cdi.classificatieCode: null and droogteniveau: "onbekend" (and, on a fetch failure, a message in the WARNINGS key-value store), but it is not charged.

Related Actors

• Netherlands Water Withdrawal Ban Monitor — the legally binding NL per-waterbody withdrawal bans, complementing EDO's EU-wide hazard index with the NL regulatory layer.
• Spain Drought & Scarcity Monitor — official MITECO reservoir/scarcity indicators per river basin, for the country-level detail behind the EU index.
• France Drought Monitor — official VigiEau per-commune restriction status.

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Zoekwoorden: EDO, Combined Drought Indicator, droogte Europa, Europese droogtemonitor, Copernicus, neerslagtekort, bodemvochttekort, vegetatie, klimaatrisico, landbouwrisico, droogtekaart.

Keywords

europe, drought, droogte, EDO, European Drought Observatory, Copernicus, CEMS, JRC, combined-drought-indicator, CDI, climate-risk, agriculture-risk, insurance-risk, precipitation, soil-moisture, open-data, geodata

Changelog

0.1.0

• Initial release: EDO Combined Drought Indicator (v4.1) status per GPS location, normalized to a watch/warning/alert/recovery/no-drought vocabulary with the raw EDO code preserved.
• Store description rewritten to lead with the task ("check current EU drought status"), add explicit drought-status/drought-risk synonyms, and state the decision benefit (no manual EDO map-reading or per-country portal lookups) and price.