US Drought Monitor Scraper — Weekly Drought Severity Data

Extract weekly US Drought Monitor (USDM) drought severity statistics straight from the official USDM data services API maintained by the National Drought Mitigation Center, USDA, and NOAA. The Drought Monitor is the authoritative weekly drought map of the United States — it triggers federal disaster designations, crop insurance decisions, and water restrictions.

This Actor returns the percent of area in each drought category (D0–D4) for any county or state, for any date range back to 2000 — over 25 years of weekly history across 3,100+ counties.

Features

• County or state aggregation
• Any date range since 2000 — absolute dates or rolling "weeks back" window
• Severity filter — only return weeks where drought reached a chosen category
• Computed worstCategory field — instantly see the most severe active drought level
• Clean, flat JSON output ready for dashboards, models, or RAG pipelines

Output fields

Field	Description
mapDate	USDM map release date (weekly)
validStart / validEnd	Week the statistics cover
fips	County FIPS code (county level)
county, state	Geography names
percentNone	% of area with no drought
percentD0Abnormal	% abnormally dry or worse
percentD1Moderate	% moderate drought or worse
percentD2Severe	% severe drought or worse
percentD3Extreme	% extreme drought or worse
percentD4Exceptional	% exceptional drought
worstCategory	Highest category with non-zero coverage (D0–D4)

How to scrape US Drought Monitor data

1. Choose Aggregation Level (county or state)
2. Set Area of Interest — a state code like TX, conus for the lower 48, or a county FIPS
3. Pick a date range (or a rolling weeksBack window)
4. Optionally set Minimum Drought Category to only capture actual drought weeks
5. Click Start

Input example

{
    "level": "county",
    "aoi": "CA",
    "weeksBack": 52,
    "minDroughtCategory": 2
}

Output example

{
    "mapDate": "2024-01-02T00:00:00",
    "fips": "48001",
    "county": "Anderson County",
    "state": "TX",
    "percentNone": 1.27,
    "percentD0Abnormal": 98.73,
    "percentD1Moderate": 66.22,
    "percentD2Severe": 5.11,
    "percentD3Extreme": 0,
    "percentD4Exceptional": 0,
    "worstCategory": "D2"
}

Who uses this data?

• Agricultural lenders and crop insurers pricing drought risk by county
• Commodity traders tracking drought stress in growing regions
• Water utilities and municipalities monitoring supply risk
• ESG and climate-risk analysts building physical-risk models

Pricing

Pay-per-result. One state-year of county data is roughly 13,000 records; a single API request, no browser, minimal compute.

FAQ

How often is the data updated? The USDM releases a new map every Thursday.

What do D0–D4 mean? D0 = abnormally dry, D1 = moderate, D2 = severe, D3 = extreme, D4 = exceptional drought.

Legal disclaimer

This Actor extracts publicly available US government data published by the National Drought Mitigation Center. You are responsible for ensuring your use of the data complies with applicable laws.