Methodology & Sources

The Monitor maps where drought is hitting U.S. row-crop acreage. For each county it pairs planted acres with current drought severity from the U.S. Drought Monitor — hard data, no insurance assumptions — and renders the result as 3D relief so the most acreage under the most stress stands out. Federal crop insurance appears as honest per-county context, not as the headline. Crops tracked: corn, soybeans, wheat (winter + spring), upland cotton, grain sorghum.

Headline math

drought_severity_score  = (D0·1 + D1·2 + D2·3 + D3·4 + D4·5) / 100   # 0–5
drought-weighted acres  = planted acres × (drought_severity ÷ 5)
grain coverage          = clip(insured grain acres ÷ grain-intended acres, 0, 1)  # context only
grain-intended acres    = NASS planted acres × grain_completion
grain_completion        = Σ grain-harvested ÷ Σ planted   (per county, closed years)
loss_ratio              = indemnity ÷ premium                          # KPI + table only

The watch list ranks counties by drought-weighted planted acres = planted acres × (drought ÷ 5) — how much acreage is under stress, blending how dry a county is with how much acreage is at stake, so a large-but-not-dry county doesn't outrank a smaller, severely-stressed one (every column is still click-sortable). The same idea appears on the map as the 3D relief layers, where planted acres become bar height and drought severity becomes the bar color, rather than a single flat shade. Insurance is not part of the ranking; the grain-coverage figure above is per-county context only.

Planted vs. grain-intended acres

Drought and grain insurance act on different slices of an acre, so the tool keeps two denominators. Drought hits everything in the ground — including wheat planted for cattle grazing ("graze-out") and corn cut for dairy silage — so the drought views and the bar height use total planted acres. The grain-coverage context, though, only reflects acres taken to grain, so it uses grain-intended acres = planted × a per-county grain-completion factor (multi-year grain-harvested ÷ planted). Without this, graze-out wheat counties (Texas/Oklahoma Panhandle) and silage-corn counties (dairy regions like Idaho's Magic Valley) would show artificially low grain coverage — the acres simply were never headed for a grain policy. The factor is pooled over recent closed years, so it reflects structural land use rather than a single price- or drought-driven season.

Reading the map

Across every view, a county's bar height is its planted acres for the chosen crop — so height always means the same thing. The map lands tilted to show the relief; drag (or use the compass) to rotate, and flatten it to read like an ordinary map. Three views share the stack, each changing only what the color means:

• Acres in Drought — bars colored by current U.S. Drought Monitor severity, 0 (none) to 5 (exceptional). Hard data only: planted acres and drought, no insurance assumptions.
• Forecast Drought — bars colored by 3-month forward drought severity: the current U.S. Drought Monitor reading nudged by NOAA CPC's Seasonal Drought Outlook (develops, persists, improves, removes). Counties without a CPC forecast show as gray.
• vs Last Year — bars colored by the change in drought severity versus the same week one year ago. Redder counties are drier than last year; bluer ones have recovered.

Bar height — planted acres — stays the same in every view; only the color changes, so the same relief reads as current drought, the forward outlook, or the year-over-year shift.

Forecast

Each county's hover shows NOAA CPC's Seasonal Drought Outlook category — whether drought is forecast to develop, persist, improve, or be removed over the coming three months (issued the 3rd Thursday of each month). It's a directional outlook, so it's surfaced as the category itself rather than folded into a score; counties without a CPC assignment show no forecast.

How insurance is shown

Insurance never drives the headline; it appears only as per-county context in the detail panel. There it's shown as a footprint across the federal crop-insurance programs on a county's ground — crop-insurance acres, grazing/forage acres, and rangeland — listed separately and never summed, since a single field can carry more than one policy. The per-crop grain-coverage figure (insured grain acres ÷ grain-intended acres) sits alongside, clearly labeled as grain coverage.

That separation matters because federal insurance on a crop's grain does not capture the separate programs — Annual Forage and Pasture, Rangeland & Forage — that insure the same ground against drought. Winter wheat grazed by cattle, for instance, is often insured as forage rather than grain. So a grain-only view understates true drought insurance: in graze-heavy regions like the Texas High Plains a county can read as thinly insured on grain while being heavily covered against drought through forage policies. A low grain-coverage number is context about one program, not a measure of how exposed a county is.

For the grain-coverage figure, federal insurance is published monthly, so the open crop year under-reports per-county insured acres until late season. The figure uses an adjusted value: the observed current-year rate, unless a stable county's open-year value is missing or drops > 10pp below its 5-year mean (the reporting lag), in which case it falls back to that 5-year mean.

Sources

All sources are matched together by county. Refreshed weekly.

Known limitations

• Grain coverage is one program, not the whole picture. The grain-coverage context reflects insurance on a crop's grain only. Separate forage and rangeland programs insure much of the same ground against drought, so a low grain-coverage figure can understate how heavily a county is actually insured (see the forage caveat above).
• Prevented-plant acres are not netted out of the grain-intended denominator, so grain coverage in flood-heavy years can read low.
• Wheat is all-classes (winter + spring excl. durum). Durum (~3% of US wheat, ND/MT) is excluded, so durum-heavy counties' grain coverage is slightly overstated.
• Cotton: upland only. Pima/extra-long-staple (~2%, AZ/CA/NM) is excluded.
• Sorghum: grain only. Silage and hybrid-seed sorghum are excluded.
• Acre-denominated insurance only. Only acre-denominated policies sum into insured acres (yield-protection rows priced in bushels are excluded).
• County-match edge cases. Virginia independent cities, Alaska/Hawaii county-equivalents, and county consolidations can mismatch across sources; counties missing the planted-acre or drought data are not drawn.
• Crop rotation. A single crop's planted acres swing year to year (corn↔soy). Grain coverage is shown as a rate (rotation-robust); the combined All view (across the five tracked crops) is the most stable multi-year lens.
• Estimated acres before NASS publishes. Early in a crop year, county planted acres are estimated (state acres × the county's 3-year share, or prior-year carry) until NASS publishes county-level data, then they auto-promote. The grain-coverage rate resting on an estimate can shift when the actuals land. The hover/panel flag the acres source.
• Graze-out wheat. In the Southern Plains (e.g., the Texas Panhandle) much wheat is dual-purpose — planted for cattle forage and never harvested for grain, so it isn't insured as grain. Planted acres count it; grain insurance does not. That legitimately lowers the grain-coverage figure in graze-heavy counties, even where forage policies cover the same ground.
• Loss ratio is volatile. One weather event in a single closed year can push a county above 5.0 — treat it as a flag, not a verdict.