Reproducibility supplement for baseline sensitivity and tail reliability of Midwest meteorological drought 1980–2020

Reproducibility supplement for a historical, statewide assessment of meteorological drought across all 12 US Census Midwest states during 1980–2020. The archive includes verified monthly gridMET and separate NOAA inputs, source URL/checksum manifests, spatial weights, methods, Python and R validation scripts, SPI/SPEI at 3-, 6- and 12-month scales, configuration-specific drought-event catalogues, baseline and tail diagnostics, and a 41-year September map atlas. Calibrations are 1981–2010 (primary) and 1991–2020 (sensitivity). The package provides a tested reproduction route from archived monthly inputs and an optional raw-input reconstruction route. National daily gridMET files are referenced by URLs and SHA-256 rather than redistributed. Findings describe calibration-dependent comparisons; they do not establish definitive state drought-risk rankings, precise extreme-event return periods, causal attribution or impact prediction. Our derived data and documentation use CC BY 4.0; original code uses MIT; provider files and dependencies retain their original terms. This is a research reproducibility release, not an accepted journal publication. Version 1.0.1 corrects automatic creation of output directories in a fresh ZIP extraction; scientific data and results are unchanged.