Drought is the most severe climatic and costly natural disaster inflicting serious impacts on the socio-economy of Australia. An Australia-wide drought monitor is being developed to provide detailed and timely data regarding drought conditions that will aid producers and policy makers alike. The Drought Monitor development is an integral part of the Northern Australia Climate Program (NACP), a major partnership between Meat & Livestock Australia, the Queensland Government and the University of Southern Queensland.

The Australian Drought Monitor is based on the U.S. Drought Monitor (USDM) concept, which was developed by Mark Svoboda and his team at the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the late 1990s. Therefore, the Composite Drought Indicator (CDI) used for the NACP project is a scaled down version of the U.S. Drought Monitor. The CDI is currently widely applied in Europe, Asia, India, Jordan, Tunisia, Lebanon, Morocco, United Arab Emirates, New Zealand and others. It is based on the combination of four different indices/indicators: Standard Precipitation Index (SPI), soil moisture anomalies, evapotranspiration anomalies and Normalised Difference Vegetation Index anomalies. ‘Anomaly’ parameters are used to represent the ‘current’ conditions related to historical baseline conditions for a given location and time period to establish the ‘severity’ of the drought conditions. For each parameter, the percentile is calculated over a baseline period and the results are ranked. To calculate the CDI, a weighting is applied to each index/indicator. The CDI is calculated for each 5 km x 5 km grid cell. The Drought Monitor relies on field observations from extension officers, Climate Mates and other experts to provide feedback for validation and “Ground Truth”. The Drought Monitor is a web-based dynamic map that will be updated monthly and will aid producers, agricultural value chains, scientists and policymakers with decision making and planning.