Monthly Palmer Drought Severity Index For US Counties 1895-2016

Monthly Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) data spanning 122 years from 1895 to 2016. The dataset provides county-level measurements for the contiguous United States, sourced from the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites - North Carolina and published by the CDC's National Environmental Public Health Tracking Network.

Use Cases

• Analyzing long-term drought trends and cycles using the `pdsi`, `year`, and `month` columns.
• Comparing drought severity across different US counties and states using `pdsi`, `countyfips`, and `statefips`.
• Correlating historical drought events (`pdsi`) with agricultural yields or public health outcomes using the temporal (`year`, `month`) and geographic (`countyfips`) identifiers.
• Training time-series forecasting models to predict future PDSI values based on historical `pdsi`, `month`, and `year` sequences.

Strengths

• 122-year temporal coverage from 1895 to 2016.
• County-level granularity for the contiguous United States, identified by `countyfips` and `statefips`.

Limitations

• Dataset ends in 2016, lacking recent data.
• Unknown total row count and sample size.
• Spatial coverage is limited to the contiguous US, excluding Alaska, Hawaii, and territories.

Provenance

Source

Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites - North Carolina, published by CDC's National Environmental Public Health Tracking Network.

Time Range

1895-2016

Freshness

Last updated in 2018; data current through 2016.

Geography

County-level data for the contiguous United States.