FORECAST DROUGHT
Where the rain is not coming. Ten days of it, for the whole world, read at the dry end of the scale.
One world, twelve ways in
LOADING…Click a region to open the explorer framed on it, or a dot to go to one of the agricultural centres this site watches — Wichita and Regina, Rosario and Cuiabá, Kharkiv and Krasnodar, Kano, Ludhiana, Zhengzhou, Wagga Wagga. The plate is Equal Earth rather than Mercator, so the Sahel and the Indo-Gangetic Plain are drawn at their true size beside Canada and Siberia.
The breadbaskets
WHERE DROUGHT IS DECIDEDUS Corn Belt & Great Plains
A third of the world's maize, almost all of it rain-fed, and the hard red winter wheat of the Plains beside it. July rain decides the crop.
The Pampas & Brazil's soy belt
Argentina's La Niña droughts, and the monsoon onset that sets planting from Mato Grosso to Paraná — the southern hemisphere's half of the world's soy.
Black Sea grain belt
Ukraine, southern Russia and northern Kazakhstan: a quarter of the world's wheat exports, grown on steppe that dries fast in a blocked summer.
The Sahel & the Horn
One rainy season from Senegal to Sudan, two short ones in the Horn — and the famine early-warning maps that follow when they fail.
South & East Asia
The Indo-Gangetic Plain on the monsoon, the North China Plain on a falling aquifer, and the Thai and Vietnamese rice that feeds the export market.
Murray–Darling & the wheatbelt
Where a drought is measured in years, and El Niño in lost tonnes. And southern Africa's maize, on the same ENSO clock.
How to read it
The dry end of the scale
A wet-climate rainfall ramp spends its colours on 100 and 200 mm. This one puts six of them inside 25 mm, because 5 against 20 over ten days is whether a dry spell breaks.
Physics and machine learning
HRES is ECMWF's physical model; AIFS is its learned twin from the same starting analysis. Where both keep a region dry, believe it. Where they disagree, that is the forecast.
Absolute colour scales
Every ramp is pinned to real millimetres, so a loop shows the rain arriving and never the palette re-fitting itself. Hover anywhere for the number under the pixel.
Coming next
Rain is the input, not the answer. The drought products are being built on top of it: forecast totals against climatology, soil moisture, evaporative demand, and the standardised indices drought monitors use. Until they land, read a dry ten-day total against what is normal for the place and the season.
Part of a network
Forecast Drought is the world member of a family of model sites: Forecast Britain reads the Met Office, Forecast Poland reads IMGW-PIB, Forecast Swiss reads MeteoSwiss, Forecast Arabia draws the Middle East, and Forecast Farm watches the growing regions. Same viewer, same colour tables, same probe — pointed at the rain that is not falling.