The Quick Drought Response Index, or QuickDRI, is a weekly alarm sensitive to early-stage drought conditions and rapidly evolving drought events. Developed by the Center for Advanced Land Management Information Technologies and the National Drought Mitigation Center, both part of the university's School of Natural Resources, and in coordination with USGS, the index combines and analyzes four drought indicators – precipitation, soil moisture, vegetation health and evaporative moisture loss from plants — all at once to better "see" drought conditions emerge before traditional drought-monitoring tools. QuickDRI complements VegDRI by detecting drought’s effects on vegetation at time intervals of a month or less.
The tool became operational in June 2017. Archived maps have been created dating back to January 2000 to provide a resource for assessing abnormal vegetation and climate conditions over a longer historical period. Decades of satellite data housed at the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science Center made those maps possible.
QuickDRI was funded through a $1.3 million grant from NASA's Applied Sciences for Water Resources program and had additional support from the USGS Land Remote Sensing Program.