About DroughtOdds
Why this exists
The US Drought Monitor map tells you what this week looks like. It does not tell you whether this week is normal for where you live, and that is the question behind every lawn decision: reseed, switch grass, or dig it out. DroughtOdds reads every weekly map since January 2000 for 3,222 US counties and counts the years each one spent in real drought, so one bad summer can be put next to 26 years of record.
Where the numbers come from
All drought figures come from the U.S. Drought Monitor's county statistics, which give the share of each county's area in each drought category every week. The U.S. Drought Monitor is jointly produced by the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the USDA and NOAA. DroughtOdds counts a week as "in drought" when D1 (moderate drought) or worse over at least 50% of the county's area that week, and a year as a drought year when it has 13 or more such weeks. The guide to how drought is counted sets out every rule and why it was chosen.
What it does not do
It does not forecast. A county with 6 drought years in 10 is not promised one next summer; it is a county where planning for one is sensible. It does not look below the county line, so a wet valley floor and a dry ridge in the same county share one answer. And it does not know your soil, your shade or your water bill.
Corrections
If a county's figures look wrong, say so through the contact page. Fixes go into the data pipeline, which corrects every page at once.
Who runs this
DroughtOdds is independently run. It is not affiliated with the National Drought Mitigation Center, USDA, NOAA, any water utility, or any lawn, seed or irrigation company, and nobody pays to change a county's answer.