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How we track drought in the world’s breadbaskets

What the dashboard shows, where the numbers come from, how current they are, and what they can’t tell you.

The short answer

Most of the world’s grain grows on farmland watered only by rain. When the soil dries out at sowing, flowering or grain filling, harvests fall. This dashboard shows how wet or dry the soil is this month in 26 of the main rain-fed crop regions on every inhabited continent, how often each has been in drought since 1991, the official US Drought Monitor for the main US farm states, and the countries FAO says need outside help to feed their people.

How we know

Soil moisture worldwide. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center (CPC) runs a simple model of the soil as a bucket about 1.6 metres deep, filled by rain measured at rain gauges worldwide and emptied by evaporation and runoff (Fan and van den Dool, 2004). It publishes the result every month for the whole world on a half-degree grid, back to 1948. For each crop region we average two or three grid points in its main growing area and rank the latest month against the same month in 1991–2020.

From rank to drought class. We use the percentile classes of the US Drought Monitor: soil moisture among the driest 30% of years is “abnormally dry”, the driest 20% “moderate drought”, 10% “severe”, 5% “extreme” and 2% “exceptional”. The wettest 30% count as wetter than usual.

A second opinion. A model is only as good as the rain gauges feeding it, and the number that report in real time varies. When we checked in October 2026, CPC’s rainfall for the Paris Basin over July to September was about a third of what the Paris-Orly weather station measured and of the analysis of the Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC) at Germany’s weather service (DWD), which collects many more European gauges. So beside CPC’s soil moisture we show DWD’s GPCC drought index for the same place: it combines GPCC’s rainfall with evaporation estimated from temperature over the last three months, against 1961–1990, mapped to the same drought classes. Where the two are two classes or more apart, we mark the region, because its status is uncertain. Where national experts publish a drought map, it is the better guide: the US Drought Monitor agreed with CPC in October 2026, Météo-France reported record soil dryness in the Paris Basin, and Brazil’s drought monitor showed almost no drought in Mato Grosso, where both CPC and DWD did.

Why not satellite or daily data? We first tried NASA’s POWER service, which offers daily soil wetness. Its most recent weeks come from a different model than its long record, with a jump on the changeover day, so the latest values cannot be compared with history. CPC’s monthly record comes from one model throughout, although the rain gauges feeding it change (see above).

The United States. The US Drought Monitor is a weekly map drawn by experts from the National Drought Mitigation Center, the US Department of Agriculture and NOAA, combining soil moisture, rainfall, streamflow and reports from the ground. We show its share of each main farm state in each drought class, and the share of the lower 48 states in severe drought or worse.

Food crises. FAO’s Global Information and Early Warning System lists the countries expected to need outside help with food, updated three times a year, with the main reasons for each. Bad weather is among the reasons for most of them, usually together with conflict, displacement or high food prices.

How current each part is

What the dashboard can’t tell you

The soil moisture is a model estimate from rainfall and temperature, not a measurement in the fields, and two or three points stand for a large region. Thirty years of history give only a coarse ranking at the extremes: “exceptional” means drier than any year in 1991–2020.

The model has no irrigation, so heavily irrigated regions (Punjab, the Nile delta, California’s Central Valley) are left out. It also cannot say whether a dry month falls in a critical crop stage; a dry spell after harvest matters little.

It is not a harvest forecast. For that, see the GEOGLAM Crop Monitor and national agricultural services.

Further reading

Credits

Soil moisture and rainfall from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center; the US Drought Monitor from the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, USDA and NOAA; the list of countries from FAO’s GIEWS. We only download and present their public data.

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