County-Level Drought API

Why organizations use county drought data

Drought impact doesn't stop at state lines — and neither do decisions. Crop insurance indemnities, farm loan risk reviews, and precision ag recommendations are all made at the county level. But until now, getting reliable, structured, county-level USDM data required manual downloads, messy spreadsheets, and a lot of cleanup.

R2Data2 solves that. One API call returns drought category, severity score, and per-band area coverage for any U.S. county — updated every Thursday when the USDA Drought Monitor releases its weekly assessment.

How the USDA Drought Monitor data works

The U.S. Drought Monitor (USDM) is published jointly by the USDA, NOAA, and the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS). It combines dozens of indicators — precipitation anomalies, streamflow, soil moisture, and vegetation health — into a single weekly snapshot for more than 3,100 U.S. counties.

R2Data2 serves the full USDM dataset via API with one addition: a numeric drought_severity field (–1 to 4) so you can filter, rank, and aggregate without parsing category labels.

Each record also includes d0_pct through d4_pct — the percentage of county area in each drought band. A county with drought_severity: 2 but d2_pct: 15.0 carries very different risk than one where d2_pct: 94.0. Both dimensions are in every API response.

Use cases

Crop insurance: automating USDM drought threshold monitoring

USDA's Livestock Forage Disaster Program (LFP) and Emergency Livestock Assistance Program (ELAP) both use county drought status as a program trigger. D2+ threshold crossings directly determine claim eligibility.

R2Data2 makes it straightforward to automate that lookup. Use the snapshot endpoint to pull every county in your book of business on a given release date, flag counties that crossed a drought threshold, and update loss reserves — without manual USDM file downloads.

Agricultural lending: county-level drought risk across loan portfolios

Farm loan portfolios are secured by geographically fixed collateral — crops, pasture, and equipment tied to specific counties. A lender with exposure across 200 counties in the Plains needs per-county drought history, not a regional average.

R2Data2 lets you monitor drought conditions across your entire portfolio in real time. Set automated alerts when borrower counties hit D2+ and get ahead of impairment risk before the next crop report.

AgTech: enriching field-level recommendations with drought context

County-level USDM data is the baseline that field-level sensor data gets compared against. R2Data2's /drought/metrics endpoint adds a 20-year severity percentile — a single number that tells growers exactly how current conditions rank against two decades of history — plus drought regime labels (persistent, flash, recovering) for trend context.

Index insurance: historical drought severity for actuarial pricing

Area-yield and rainfall index policies use county boundaries as the fundamental unit. Accurate actuarial pricing and loss estimation require deep historical drought severity by county. R2Data2 stores the full USDM archive going back to 2000 — Growth and Pro plans unlock the complete history, enough to model drought cycles, compute return periods, and price products against 25+ years of weekly county-level records.

API endpoints

All drought endpoints require an API key in the X-API-Key header. The free tier provides the last 52 weeks of history for any county, with 100 requests/day.

County time series

The workhorse endpoint. Give it a FIPS code and get back a list of weekly drought records — useful for charting drought history, computing trend metrics, or screening a specific county before a loan review or underwriting decision.

# Last 4 weeks of drought data for Polk County, Iowa (FIPS 19153)
curl https://r2data2.com/drought/county/19153?limit=4 \
  -H "X-API-Key: agr_your_key_here"

{
  "fips": "19153",
  "records": [
    {
      "fips": "19153",
      "county_name": "Polk",
      "state_abbr": "IA",
      "drought_category": "D1",
      "drought_severity": 1,
      "d0_pct": 100.0,
      "d1_pct": 72.4,
      "d2_pct": 0.0,
      "d3_pct": 0.0,
      "d4_pct": 0.0,
      "valid_date": "2025-04-10"
    }
  ]
}

Use start_date and end_date query parameters for a specific date range. The limit parameter caps results (default 52).

National snapshot

Think of this as the weekly sweep. Run it every Thursday to pull every county that crossed a drought threshold in the latest USDM release — then diff it against last week to catch new D2+ counties before anyone else does.

# All Iowa counties in drought on 2025-04-10
curl "https://r2data2.com/drought/snapshot/2025-04-10?state=IA&min_severity=1" \
  -H "X-API-Key: agr_your_key_here"

{
  "valid_date": "2025-04-10",
  "count": 61,
  "records": [
    {
      "fips": "19001",
      "county_name": "Adair",
      "state_abbr": "IA",
      "drought_category": "D2",
      "drought_severity": 2,
      "d0_pct": 100.0,
      "d1_pct": 100.0,
      "d2_pct": 58.1,
      "d3_pct": 0.0,
      "d4_pct": 0.0,
      "valid_date": "2025-04-10"
    }
  ]
}

Drought metrics

Raw category data tells you where a county stands today. The metrics endpoint tells you how it got there and where it's headed — consecutive weeks in drought, rolling average severity, 20-year percentile ranking, and a drought_regime label (persistent, flash, recovering). Use it to build early-warning dashboards or score portfolio risk before a drought fully develops.

See the Data Dictionary for the full field reference and API Docs for interactive request testing.

Frequently asked questions