From the Drought Impact Reporter to the Drought Impacts Toolkit: Evolution, Experience, and Data from Tracking Drought Impacts Across Two Decades

Abstract The National Drought Mitigation Center began tracking drought impacts in July 2005, when the Drought Impact Reporter (DIR, go.unl.edu/DIRdash) launched, and now has 20 years of longitudinal data for research, planning, policy and historic inquiry. The DIR was established as the nation’s comprehensive archive of drought impacts and has evolved with the U.S. Drought Monitor. Drought impacts cross sectors, including agriculture, energy, water supply, fire, river transport, tourism, landscaping, and human and ecosystem health. Scale matters, with different impacts coming into focus at different scales, and individual farmers and ranchers experiencing impacts that may disappear at a macro-economic scale. As of July 2026, the DIR had logged over 26,500 impact reports with 306,000 unique combinations of description, place and time, and sector. Although there is no single way to quantify drought impacts or calculate dollar values, there are methods for working with event-based, narrative data. DIR data help answer questions such as what impacts have occurred at different levels of drought across states and sectors. The DIR now focuses on gathering evidence of impacts reported in news media and is a main tool in the NDMC’s Drought Impacts Toolkit. Impact-related data from other processes, such as crowdsourcing and more automated media scraping, appear on separate tools. The DIR data are especially valuable given the World Meteorological Organization’s recommendation to its member nations around the world to implement impact-based forecasting of hazards, the National Academies of Science’s emphasis on impacts in drought assessment, and AI’s need for training data.