This site displays near real-time moisture anomalies. Anomalies are measured as water balance percentiles relative to levels from 1991 to 2020. Values close to 50 represent normal conditions. Values below and above that mid-value indicate dryer- and wetter-than-normal conditions, respectively. Moisture anomalies are monitored on a monthly basis, from 2001 to present.
The temperature, precipitation, and potential evapotranspiration data used to create the water balance index come from ERA5 monthly averaged data and were downloaded using the Copernicus Climate Data Store (CDS) Application Program Interface (API), or CDS API.
All GeoPackage files were converted to GeoJSON format in GeoPandas. From there, we used Tippecanoe to convert the GeoJSON files to Mapbox .mbtiles format and used the Mapbox tool mbutil to convert those tiles to .pbf format.
For back-end data analysis/transformation of NetCDF and TIF files, we used Python and R. Those rasters were then converted to Zarr pyramids using CarbonPlan's ndpyramid package.
This site's interface and functionality rely heavily on code developed by CarbonPlan. Specifically, we used the maps, components, and layouts libraries. We took inspiration from CarbonPlan's forest-risks-web code repository to create an updated and modified user interface for this data viewer. Additionally, we modified the <ExpandingSection /> component from the prototype-maps repository. You can read more about CarbonPlan's research and software development work here.