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Drought Sample

This page provides a complete sample response for a drought hazard from the Active Hazards API endpoint. Drought hazards in the United States are sourced from the U.S. Drought Monitor (NDMC, USDA, NOAA, and NASA), which publishes a weekly national assessment. Each DisasterAWARE drought hazard corresponds to one Drought Monitor region — the sample below is the South region — and its exposure areas are the Drought Monitor's intensity classes.

Drought-Specific Properties

Incident Data

The incident.properties object for a Drought Monitor hazard carries the weekly narrative and its publication timing rather than a CAP alert:

  • senderName - The issuing consortium (U.S. Drought Monitor and its four partner agencies)

  • sourceRecordId - The Drought Monitor region key (e.g., "south")

  • headlineDescription / description - The region's weekly narrative summary

  • sent / effective / expires - Publication date, the date the assessment took effect, and the date the next weekly update is expected

  • reportDate / eventDate - The assessment date

  • incidentLocationName - Region name (e.g., "South, United States")

  • hazardName / hazardSeverity - The hazard title and its DisasterAWARE severity

  • sourceMessageHash - Content hash of the source message, used to detect unchanged weekly re-publications

  • scope - "ACTUAL"

  • ingestedAt / processedAt - Pipeline timestamps

Features

The features collection contains a single MultiPolygon feature covering the region, with exposureLevel, exposureDescription, and intensity properties. Unlike most other types it has no featureType and no SMART_ALERT feature. The features collection carries metadata, incidentType, and sourceId at collection level alongside type and features, and each feature's geometry object embeds a copy of the feature's properties. See Feature collections.

Exposure Areas

Drought hazards use four exposure levels, one per Drought Monitor intensity class, each a MultiPolygon:

  • Level 0: Limited to No Damage Expected

  • Level 1: Moderate Damage Expected

  • Level 2: Strong Damage Expected

  • Level 3: Severe Damage Expected

Because a region can span several states and the areas are large, exposureAssessment for a drought hazard reports populations in the tens of millions, broken down by country (the South region reaches into Mexico) and by state in totalByAdmin.

Source

source is null on this record; the provider is identified in incident.properties.senderName and in features.sourceId.

Sample Response

Note: Coordinate arrays have been replaced with [...] for brevity. In actual API responses, these properties contain complete GeoJSON coordinate arrays. Long text fields have been truncated. All other values are verbatim from the production API as of 2026-09-11.

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