2022-2026 National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) Strategic Plan

The 2022–2026 National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) Strategic Plan outlines and advances NIDIS’s approach to building a national drought early warning system (DEWS). 

This Plan presents an expanded set of priorities for the next five years, identified through consultative engagement with Federal, tribal, state, and local partners. It reflects the need to better understand drought impacts to the economy, ecosystems, public health, and the interactions of drought and wildland fire in specific locations and how these may be connected across regions. The Plan creates a process to expand regional DEWS coverage into areas such as Alaska, Hawaii and the U.S. Affiliated Pacific Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and on Tribal lands to ensure equitable access to localized drought information services. It advances the 2019 NIDIS reauthorization mandate to focus on advancing subseasonal to seasonal (S2S) forecasting, through continued investments in partnerships such as with the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center, and the U.S. Geological Survey. Finally, the Plan includes an emphasis on implementation of the National Coordinated Soil Moisture Monitoring Network Strategy. 

The plan builds upon the 2016 NIDIS Implementation Plan Update, and incorporates many of the priorities and themes captured in the Regional DEWS Strategic Plans, as well as the strategic documents that accompany National-level NIDIS initiatives (such as the NDAWN Strategy). As was the case with each of these guiding documents, the 2022–2026 NIDIS Strategic Plan was produced with significant input from partners and stakeholders around the country throughout 2021–2022.