Drought is one of the most destructive and expensive natural disasters, severely impacting natural resources and risks by depleting water resources and diminishing agricultural yields. Under climate change, accurately predicting drought is critical for mitigating drought-induced risks. However, the intricate interplay among the physical and biological drivers that regulate droughts limits the predictability and understanding of drought, particularly at a subseasonal to seasonal (S2S) time scale. While deep learning has been demonstrated with potential in addressing climate forecasting challenges, its application to drought prediction has received relatively less attention. In this work, we propose a new dataset, DroughtSet, which integrates relevant predictive features and three drought indices from multiple remote sensing and reanalysis datasets across the contiguous United States (CONUS). DroughtSet specifically provides the machine learning community with a new real-world dataset to benchmark drought prediction models and more generally, time-series forecasting methods. Furthermore, we propose a spatial-temporal model SPDrought to predict and interpret S2S droughts. Our model learns from the spatial and temporal information of physical and biological features to predict three types of droughts simultaneously. Multiple strategies are employed to quantify the importance of physical and biological features for drought prediction. Our results provide insights for researchers to better understand the predictability and sensitivity of drought to biological and physical conditions. We aim to contribute to the climate field by proposing a new tool to predict and understand the occurrence of droughts and provide the AI community with a new benchmark to study deep learning applications in climate science.

The importance of monitoring and predicting droughts is underscored by their frequent occurrence in diverse geographical landscapes (Ghozat et al., 2023). Moreover, the likelihood of droughts is expected to increase in the context of global climate change (Xiujia et al., 2022). Their accurate forecasting, however, is a complex problem due to the inherent difficulty in predicting the onset, duration, and cessation of drought events (Mishra and Desai, 2005). This complexity necessitates the development of sophisticated forecasting models that can effectively navigate these challenges. To frame our problem, it is essential to define the prediction target and establish a suitable time horizon for forecasting (Zhang et al., 2019). Given our focus on long-term decision-making, we aim to generate forecasts that extend 12 months into the future. Selecting an appropriate target for drought prediction is more challenging due to its dependence on multiple climatic factors, including temperature and precipitation. Among the various drought severity indices, the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) (McKee et al., 1993) and the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) (Alley, 1984) stand out as fundamental measures.

And with severe drought continuing to plague parts of the Prairies, along with Great Plains states, they can apply their AI program to real-world conditions. But Trevor Hadwen, a climate specialist at Agriculture Canada's research lab in Regina, explains their program, called Drought Outlook, is built to forecast drought conditions and looks 30 days into the future. It's a fairly complex model, looking at how droughts develop and how rain and moisture levels affect those droughts into the future." The US looks at conditions from the US Drought Monitor, then applies a group of meteorologists to that drought, looking at a wide variety of things, directly from expert interpretation. Hadwen reports what the Drought Outlook program is forecasting for those regions over the next 30 days. And with severe drought continuing to plague parts of the Prairies, along with Great Plains states, they can apply their AI program to real-world conditions. But Trevor Hadwen, a climate specialist at Agriculture Canada's research lab in Regina, explains their program, called Drought Outlook, is built to forecast drought conditions and looks 30 days into the future. It's a fairly complex model, looking at how droughts develop and how rain and moisture levels affect those droughts into the future."

Climate scientists at Agriculture Canada labs have been building and refining an artificial intelligence-based program for the past couple of years. And with severe drought continuing to plague parts of the Prairies, along with Great Plains states, they can apply their AI program to real-world conditions. Drought monitor programs have been in place in most developed countries for decades. But a monitor program simply provides current weather events and conditions. But Trevor Hadwen, a climate specialist at Agriculture Canada's research lab in Regina, explains their program, called Drought Outlook, is built to forecast drought conditions and looks 30 days into the future.

Drought is a serious natural disaster that has a long duration and a wide range of influence. To decrease the drought-caused losses, drought prediction is the basis of making the corresponding drought prevention and disaster reduction measures. While this problem has been studied in the literature, it remains unknown whether drought can be precisely predicted or not with machine learning models using weather data. To answer this question, a real-world public dataset is leveraged in this study and different drought levels are predicted using the last 90 days of 18 meteorological indicators as the predictors. In a comprehensive approach, 16 machine learning models and 16 deep learning models are evaluated and compared. The results show no single model can achieve the best performance for all evaluation metrics simultaneously, which indicates the drought prediction problem is still challenging. As benchmarks for further studies, the code and results are publicly available in a Github repository.

Drought is a natural creeping threat with numerous damaging effects in various aspects of human life. Accurate drought prediction is a promising step in helping policy makers to set drought risk management strategies. To fulfill this purpose, choosing appropriate models plays an important role in predicting approach. In this study, different models of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) are employed to predict short and long-term of droughts by using Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) at different time scales, including 3, 6, 12, 24 and 48 months in Tabriz city, Iran. To this end, different combination of calculated SPI and time series of various hydro-meteorological variables, such as precipitation, wind velocity, relative humidity and sunshine hours for years 1992 to 2010 are used to train the ANN models. In order to compare the models performances, some well-known measures, namely RMSE, Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Correlation Coefficient (CC) are utilized in the present study. The results illustrate that the application of all hydro-meteorological variables significantly improves the prediction of SPI at different time scales.