Harmonized Palmer Drought Severity Indices throughout the Contiguous United States for HydroBASINS basins

In times of a changing hydroclimate and growing human population, there is a need to assess how various climatic and demand conditions influence water availability on the landscape. Tendency for drought conditions is a prime example of a key hydroclimatic metric that is useful for understanding water retention in the surrounding landscape. However, merging drought climatological data with co-located aquatic data is challenging. To facilitate national-scale analyses of basin-level drought conditions (i.e., Palmer Drought Severity Index; PDSI) with co-located water quality data, we present aggregated PDSI data for the contiguous United States. Data are aggregated using the HydroBASINS basin shapefiles. HYBAS_ID is retained to enable merging with HydroBASINS parent datasets.