TerraDrought is the first global system for monitoring and forecasting drought occurrence and its impacts. Visit terradrought.unl.edu for the U.S. version.By NDMC Communications
Researchers from the Global Change Research Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CzechGlobe) and the U.S. National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln have launched TerraDrought, the first global system for monitoring and forecasting drought occurrence and its impacts.
Users can access current and detailed information on ongoing drought episodes worldwide, as well as an archive of past events, on terradrought.eu and the U.S. counterpart terradrought.unl.edu. The impacts component of the monitoring system is based on a continuous analysis of media outputs in 14 world languages, carried out by a team of students from Brno universities.
The entire project is coordinated by the team that has been running the Intersucho project since 2011, monitoring drought in the Czech Republic and Central Europe. A few years ago, the same group also launched, together with the Windy.com platform, a global system for monitoring and forecasting soil moisture.
“However, a soil-moisture anomaly does not automatically mean that drought is causing any real problems. Our analyses show that drought is an increasingly serious issue, and our goal is to provide up-to-date information on its impacts anywhere in the world,” said team leader and bioclimatologist Miroslav Trnka.
Over the past three years, a ten-member team collected and analyzed news reports related to drought impacts, mainly in English and also in French and Spanish. These included reports from online versions of print media, news websites, television, and radio. In total, roughly 8,000 media articles were gathered and sorted geographically and by the sector affected—agriculture, drinking-water supply, wildfires, transportation, and others.
“From these reports, we built a large text model and, with the help of AI, we can now very reliably identify drought-related information in 14 languages. This gives us access to far more reports—something that would otherwise require dozens of additional collaborators,” Trnka noted. Current team members mainly supervise AI to ensure that it assigns reports correctly and help improve the system further.
The NDMC, based in the School of Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska, has been collaborating with CzechGlobe colleagues for 25 years. “It’s great to see this long-term partnership bring a project like this to fruition,” said Mark Svoboda, NDMC director. “We have learned from each other through countless conversations and multiple visits over the years.”
“I am really pleased to see that drought impacts are a key part of TerraDrought,” said Kelly Helm Smith, NDMC assistant director and drought impacts researcher. “Impacts tell us how drought is affecting people and places, and help us figure out who needs help.”
Continuous monitoring makes it possible to track the development of drought in different regions and observe escalating impacts as drought intensifies. “In the future, we will also be able to forecast impacts,” said Trnka.
The project aims to support countries that lack their own monitoring systems. It may, for example, help direct humanitarian aid in time. At the same time, it complements national monitoring systems in countries that already track drought. “Our data allow them to see and understand events in a global context,” Trnka added.
Globally, drought significantly affects agricultural production and the availability of key commodities such as wheat or maize, but it also impacts transportation. When flows in major rivers drop significantly, inland shipping collapses—disrupting large parts of industry and export. “Such information may be useful not only for commodity analysts but also for planning import and export routes for Czech companies,” Trnka said.