Drought intensity is based on the globally-adapted SoilClim water balance model (Řehoř et al., 2021), which calculates relative soil moisture using various meteorological inputs together with information about vegetation and soils.
The meteorological inputs are derived from the Integrated Weather Forecast (IFS) by the European Center for Medium-range Weather Forecast (ECMWF), the canopy information is based on the global Leaf area index, and the soil inputs are based on SoilGrids (Hengl et al. 2014, Hengl et al. 2017). The Drought intensity is calculated as an anomaly of current soil moisture content compared to the average of the reference period (1981-2020). For each pixel, the model calculates daily soil moisture values, and based on the comparison to the reference period value, it categorizes the pixel into one of the six categories of drought intensity. These categories are derived from historical percentile values. For each day and each pixel, the percentiles are determined using the +/-10 day window (i.e., 21 days) for a given day throughout the whole reference period (i.e., 40 years). With this approach, the percentiles are determined for each day of the year based on 840 values. More specifically, the 1st, 2nd, 5th, 10th, 20th, and 30th percentiles are used as the thresholds for determining the final drought intensity categorical values, which range from zero to six, representing different drought severity categories. Results of the model are in the form of geoTIFF files with a 500 m spatial resolution.
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