GWX — Agricultural Drought — Soil-Moisture Deficit

Which drought types show a detected increase, and where

Each of the three deficits below at its D2+ (severe or worse) default, against this site's combined detection standard: IPCC's likelihood criterion at each variable's multiple-comparisons-adjusted bar, plus a magnitude-vs-variability check. Meteorological and agricultural drought come from ERA5, hydrological from GloFAS — so where two or three agree, they agree across unrelated data.

Drought type	Global	Africa	Asia	Europe	North America	South America	Oceania
Meteorologicala rainfall deficit	yes	yes	no	no	no	yes	no
Agriculturala root-zone soil-moisture deficit	yes	no*	yes	no	yes	yes	no
Hydrologicala river low-flow deficit	yes	yes	no	no	no	yes	no

no* marks a borderline case that clears the flat 10% bar and misses its adjusted one: Africa agricultural at p=0.066 against 0.051. Reported as what it is rather than rounded into agreement. Every verdict comes from the same computation the panels below render, so this table cannot disagree with them. See the Methodology page for the construction of each index.

Agricultural Drought — Soil-Moisture Deficit — Asia

Monthly

% of Asia's land area (5°-coarsened grid, each cell weighted by its spherical area times its land fraction) whose 3-month mean soil moisture falls at a selectable USDM-equivalent severity level or worse against that cell's same-calendar-month history -- same construction as the global Agricultural Drought panel, scoped to Asia. Unit: % of land area.

Series

Source: ARCO-ERA5 (ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis, Google Cloud mirror)

Computing trend…

Select a depth and severity level above -- root zone (0-100cm), the water a crop can reach, or surface (0-7cm), which responds within days and is the layer satellite products observe. ERA5 models soil moisture rather than observing it. The assimilation of screen-level temperature and humidity nudges its upper layers, which damps long-term trends -- so read this series as a record of interannual drought events rather than as a precise century-scale drying rate. See Methodology.