Combined county-level drought incidence, damage, and census data

The threat of droughts and their associated impacts on the landscape and human communities have long been recognized in the United States, especially in high risk areas such as the southcentral region. This project examines whether existing drought indices can predict the occurrence of drought events and their actual damages, how the adaptive capacity (i.e., resilience) varies across space, and what public outreach and engagement effort would be most effective for mitigation of risk and impacts. The study region includes all 503 counties in Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. This data set was created to assess the community resilience to the drought hazards using the Resilience Inference Measurement (RIM) model. The data include county-level variables on drought hazards, damages, socioeconomic, and environmental variables for the time period 1991-2010.