Climate Engine Launches New Website to Facilitate Drought and Vegetation Monitoring

ClimateEngine.org is an innovative tool that provides satellite and climate data in a user-friendly manner to facilitate water conservation, wildfire risk management, agricultural productivity monitoring, and ecological restoration. Created through a partnership between researchers at Desert Research Institute, the University of California Merced, Google, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Bureau of Land Management, and other federal partners, Climate Engine allows users to create maps and time series plots for visualizing complex climate data. Now, the team is launching a new publicly accessible platform designed to produce comprehensive and detailed reports for all BLM-managed lands in the contiguous United States. The reports combine scalable drought summaries and near real-time vegetation conditions to help inform planning and decision-making.  

"The goal of this new platform is to lower the barrier to using timely drought and satellite-based vegetation datasets for resource managers,” said Eric Jensen, geospatial data scientist at DRI. “We have worked closely with the BLM Aquatic Resources, Assessment, Inventory, and Monitoring, and Rangeland Management Programs to identify relevant drought indicators, make it easy for managers to pinpoint the land unit they’re interested in, and download a simple report that they can use for reporting and decision-making processes.”

The website provides both drought and site characterization reports that assess drought indicators and satellite-based vegetation cover and productivity over time, with data extending back to 1986 based on the Landsat satellite archive. All reports are publicly free to view and download, which builds transparency into the decision-making process.

Read more at Desert Research Institute

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