Global Snow Drought Data Set

This data set contains information about snow droughts (or deficits in snow water equivalent, SWE) and their characteristics (e.g., duration and intensity) across the globe. The snow drought information is derived using SWE from a global reanalysis over 1980-2018, which was standardized using methods described in Huning and AghaKouchak (2020).<br>The ASCII file summarizes the change in snow drought characteristics for seven study regions around the world: the western United States, Europe, Hindu Kush and Central Asia, greater Himalayas, eastern Russia, extratropical Andes, and Patagonia. Each row in the file contains information for one of these regions. The first column lists the names of the regions. Columns 2-4 contain information related to the change in 1) total duration of snow droughts, 2) average duration of snow droughts, and 3) exceedance probability of snow drought intensity. A positive (negative) change indicates that an increase (decrease) in the respective variable occurred during the latter half of years in the period 1980-2018. Percent changes are given for both the total and average snow drought durations as the difference normalized by the value of the variable from the first half of the time period. The exceedance probability refers to the chance that the drought intensity (i.e., strength or severity of drought conditions) is greater than the average intensity from the first half of the record. Changes in the probabilities are provided as differences.<br>For more information about the regions listed above and the standardized SWE index (SWEI) used to generate the data provided here, refer to Huning and AghaKouchak (2020).<br><br><b>References</b>Huning, L.S., and AghaKouchak, A. (2020), Global snow drought hot spots and characteristics, <i>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences</i>, in press.