Soil moisture‐based drought monitoring at different time scales: a case study for the U.S. Great Plains

Short‐term agricultural drought and longer term hydrological drought have important ecological and socioeconomic impacts. Soil moisture monitoring networks have potential to assist in the quantification of drought conditions because soil moisture changes are mostly due to precipitation and evapotranspiration, the two dominant water balance components in most areas. In this study, the Palmer approach to calculating a drought index was combined with a soil water content‐based moisture anomaly calculation. A drought lag time parameter was introduced to quantify the time between the start of a moisture anomaly and the onset of drought. The methodology was applied to four shortgrass prairie sites along a North‐South transect in the U.S. Great Plains with an 18‐year soil moisture record. Short time lags led to high periodicity of the resulting drought index, appropriate for assessing short‐term drought conditions at the field scale (agricultural drought). Conversely, long time lags led to low periodicity of the drought index, being more indicative of long‐term drought conditions at the watershed or basin scale (hydrological drought). The influence of daily, weekly, and monthly time steps on the drought index was examined and found to be marginal. The drought index calculated with a short drought lag time showed evidence of being normally distributed. A longer data record is needed to assess the statistical distribution of the drought index for longer drought lag times.