News

By NDMC Communications

The Drought Impact Reporter (DIR) marked 20 years of data collection in July 2025, and several new visualizations and products have come online since late 2025.

“The DIR is the first dedicated drought impact database and interface of its kind in the U.S. and is one of the first, possibly the very first, in the world to take a broad, sustained, multi-sector approach to drought impact data collection,” said Mark Svoboda, National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC) director and one of the original researchers involved in the DIR.

An updated user interface enhances data display and retrieval, at go.unl.edu/DIRdash.

It displays drought impacts – a loss or change at a specific place and time due to drought – from a database that has been continually updated in near-real time since July 2005. The DIR moderator adds spatial data, associating impacts with one or more states, counties or cities, and checks relevant sectors. The Esri-based web app includes filters, maps, charts and data download capability.

“The NDMC’s impacts team is especially grateful for the efforts of Denise Gutzmer, the main DIR moderator, who has consistently applied her impact-tracking instincts for the past 20 years, through a few different major workflow overhauls, and to our GIS developer, Ian Ratcliffe, who has been willing to think outside the box to make the full scope of Denise’s work visible and accessible for users,” said Kelly Helm Smith, NDMC assistant director and drought impacts coordinator. “This kind of focus over time, as well as the NDMC’s long-term commitment to DIR staffing, is pretty unusual in this day and age.”

Twenty Years of Drought Impact Reporter Data (2005-2025) is now available as a convenient download from a data repository with extensive metadata describing each variable.

“I’d really like to demystify the idea of using narrative data,” Smith said. “If you’ve heard me present, you’ve probably heard me say that systematically gathered narrative data from news articles is not anecdotal. Narrative data points are like instrumental data in that they both benefit from context and triangulation, a convergence of evidence approach.”

New uses for the data are also emerging. Smith said, “AI researchers now tell us that this type of data, a trove of human-classified text, is extremely helpful for training natural language processing models to recognize drought impacts.”

Using that same 20-year DIR dataset, the interactive State Impacts Table tool is updated to include the most recent two years of data through 2025, now with new insights on impacts at higher levels of drought newly experienced by some states in the past two years. The dataset for the table comes from joining drought impacts and U.S. Drought Monitor status by place and time, using the impact start date. Detail on data joining and filtering is described online, with the R script available via GitHub.

The tables provide a comprehensive list of impacts recorded for each state at each level of drought, with filters for season, weeks in drought, sector and keyword, also with download capability.

“Some researchers may find that initial search and filter results from the State Impact Table tool are exactly what they need,” Smith said. “Others may want to do some additional work for a specific decision-making context. I’m hoping that having the data and code easily accessible will save them some work.”

The NDMC launched the DIR in 2005 in response to an identified need for data on drought impacts, Svoboda said. “People use drought impact data for policy responses, including distributing relief, for planning to reduce vulnerability, and for research, especially to help calibrate or interpret drought indexes. Drought impact data in near real time is one of the inputs to the U.S. Drought Monitor, so the data collection has evolved as part of the ongoing conversation on weekly drought assessment,” he said. “Drought impacts are an integral piece, the glue if you will, of integrated drought risk management and as such they need to be monitored as part of a drought early warning information system just like any other environmental parameter.”

Initial DIR researchers included Don Wilhite, NDMC’s founding director, Mike Hayes, NDMC’s next director, and Svoboda. Several current and former staff members have been involved over the years. Smith rejoined NDMC in 2006, shortly after the DIR was established, and found that with a background in history, journalism and community and regional planning, she had an affinity for narrative data, and became involved with the evolution of the DIR.

“The drought center’s mission is to help people reduce their vulnerability to drought,” Smith said. “Drought impacts are a starting point. Hopefully by getting this data out there, we can help people – whether it’s individual farmers or ranchers, or a city water supplier, or a state planner – figure out how to prevent some of the future effects of drought.”

The Drought Impact Reporter is online at https://go.unl.edu/DIRdash and is the oldest tool in the Drought Impacts Toolkit.