A new Czech–American project is quietly changing the way the world can track one of the most damaging climate extremes. TerraDrought, launched jointly by scientists from the Global Change Research Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, is the first system to combine global drought monitoring, short-term forecasting and real-time tracking of drought impacts in a single platform.
The tool is hosted on parallel European and US platforms and grows out of decades of experience on both sides of the Atlantic. The Nebraska centre has monitored drought in North America since the mid-1990s, while the Czech team joined the field in 2012, first focusing on the Czech Republic before expanding to global monitoring in cooperation with a private weather provider. TerraDrought is the result of an effort to merge these strands into one system, pooling data quality, modelling expertise and long-term operational know-how.
At its core, TerraDrought offers a global snapshot of how wet or dry soils are compared to what is normal for a given place and time of year. Users can see current soil moisture conditions, expressed as a deviation from the historical average, and can explore a range of conventional drought indices that summarise water balance over periods from weeks to several years. This allows a farmer in Argentina or a water manager in India not only to see that conditions are dry, but also to know whether they resemble a typical seasonal fluctuation or something closer to a once-in-a-decade event.
TerraDrought’s added value lies in its forward-looking and impact-focused components. On the physical side, the system offers forecasts roughly ten days ahead, indicating whether drought conditions in a region are likely to ease or intensify in the coming days. Even this relatively short horizon can be important for decisions such as whether to adjust irrigation schedules, delay planting, move livestock or brace for lower hydropower output. The team plans to extend the forecast range in the future as models and computing resources improve.
Equally important is the second pillar: systematic information on what drought is actually doing to societies and economies. While drought can be defined through rainfall, soil moisture or river flows, what matters in practice is when it disrupts harvests, shipping, energy production or water supplies. TerraDrought therefore tracks drought impacts in near real time by scanning and cataloguing reports from media and institutional sources in fourteen languages. Each week, the system compiles and geo-references new entries, building a database of concrete effects ranging from crop failures and livestock losses to restrictions on river transport or power generation.
This dual approach means that users can, for example, see that a region is entering an unusually severe soil moisture deficit while at the same time reading that local grain traders are warning about lower yields, or that shipping on a major river is being limited by low water levels. For global markets, this is valuable intelligence. A company buying maize futures may want early signals that a key producing region is under stress. A logistics firm needs to know whether river levels are likely to disrupt barge traffic in South America or Europe. In previous decades, such insights often arrived only after the damage had already been done.
Behind the sleek maps and dashboards is a surprisingly small team. The physical side of the system draws on large-scale modelling work by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, with data integrated and visualised through cooperation with a private weather platform. On the impacts side, TerraDrought combines artificial intelligence with the work of a dedicated group of undergraduate and graduate students, who have spent the past four years reading, classifying and verifying tens of thousands of drought-related reports worldwide. Launching the platform required building up a robust historical dataset of more than 15,000 fully processed impact records to give context to new events as they occur.
The same Czech–American team is also working on a global integrated drought indicator: a single, composite index designed to condense multiple data sources into one clear map for decision-makers who do not have time to interpret an array of specialised charts. In a world of rapid information flows and short attention spans, the challenge is not only accurate science but also communication that is simple enough to guide action.
TerraDrought is intended for a wide audience. In the United States and other developed economies, drought information is already used by a broad spectrum of professions, from farmers and water utilities to financial markets. Stock exchanges and commodity traders rely on drought data when pricing contracts for wheat or maize. Governments use such information to design support schemes for affected regions or to manage strategic food reserves. Insurance companies look at soil moisture and impact records when modelling risk. TerraDrought aims to bring this level of insight to a global audience, including regions where national monitoring systems are weaker or fragmented.
The scientists behind the project also want to highlight a less visible dimension: many droughts never make headlines. Local shortages, moderately bad harvests or low river flows that force small adjustments in supply chains can accumulate into significant impacts without ever being recognised as a major “event”. By systematically recording both physical conditions and reported consequences, TerraDrought can reveal patterns of vulnerability that might otherwise be overlooked and help societies react before a crisis escalates.
The team chose to launch the system during the Northern Hemisphere winter, when conditions are relatively calm and there is time to fine-tune the platform. For now, Europe and the Czech Republic are in a relatively safe position, with soil moisture close to normal and few recorded impacts. This quiet phase offers an ideal window to test the system before the next intense drought season arrives somewhere in the world.
In the longer term, the significance of TerraDrought goes beyond any single drought episode. As climate change alters rainfall patterns and increases the frequency and severity of extremes, drought is becoming a central risk for agriculture, food security, energy systems and international trade. A tool that can show, almost in real time, where the land is drying and how societies are feeling the effects is more than an academic exercise. It is an early-warning system for a world in which water stress will shape economies, politics and everyday life far more than in the recent past.
