Dai, A., K. E. Trenberth, and T. Karl, 1998: Global variations in droughts and wet spells: 1900-1995.
Geophys. Res. Lett.,25, 3367-3370.
The Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) is devised by Palmer (1965) to represent the severity of dry and wet spells over the U.S. based on monthly temperature and precipitation data as well as the soil-water holding capacity at that location. These data consist of the monthly PDSI over global land areas from 1860 to 1995 derived using monthly surface air temperature (from Hansen and Lebedeff, 1987 and updates) and precipitation (from Dai et al., 1997) data. Soil-holding capacity was fixed to climatological maps from Webb et al.(1993). More details can be found in Dai et. al. (1998).
The dataset is available here.
The documentation and data were copied from NCAR CAS.
REFERENCES:
Dai, A., I. Fung, and A. D. Del Genio, 1997: Surface observed global land
precipitation variations during 1900-1988.
J. Climate, 10, 2943-2962.
Dai, A., K. E. Trenberth, and T. Karl, 1998: Global variations in droughts and wet spells: 1900-1995.
Geophys. Res. Lett., 25, 3367-3370.
Hansen, J. and S. Lebedeff, 1987: Global trends of measured surface air temperature. J. Geophys. Res., 92, 13345-37.
Palmer, W. C, 1965: Meteorological Drought. Res. Paper No.45, 58pp., Dept. of Commerce, Washington, D.C.
Webb, R. S., C. E. Rosenzweig, and E. R. Levine, 1993: Specifying land surface characteristics in general circulation models: soil profile dataset and derived water-holding capacities.
Global Biogeochem. Cycles,7, 97-108.
