A Review of Twentieth-Century Drought Indices Used in the United States

The monitoring and analysis of drought have long suffered from the lack of an adequate definition of the phenomenon. As a result, drought indices have slowly evolved during the last two centuries from simplistic approaches based on some measure of rainfall deficiency, to more complex problem-specific models. Indices developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century included such measures as percent of normal precipitation over some interval, consecutive days with rain below a given threshold, formulae involving a combination of temperature and precipitation, and models factoring in precipitation deficits over consecutive days. The incorporation of evapotranspiration as a measure of water demand by Thornthwaite led to the landmark development in 1965 by Palmer of a water budget-based drought index that is still widely used. Drought indices developed since the 1960s include the Surface Water Supply Index, which supplements the Palmer Index by integrating snowpack, reservoir storage, streamflow, a...