Global assessment of sub-national drought impact based on the Geocoded Disasters dataset and land reanalysis

Abstract. Despite the importance of a linkage between hydro-meteorological drought hazards and their socio-economic impact, the linkage at a sub-national level has yet to be evaluated due to the lack of precise sub-national information on disaster locations. Using the newly developed Geocoded Disasters (GDIS) dataset, we examined whether the sub-national socio-economic drought information could be represented by hydro-meteorological hazards quantified from soil moisture in ERA5-Land during 1964–2018. We found that ERA5-Land soil moisture accurately captured the socio-economic impacts of drought shown in GDIS. Our comparison between GDIS and ERA5-Land can quantify vulnerability to drought, and we found that Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia were vulnerable to drought while North America and Europe were robust to drought. Both GDIS and ERA5-Land indicated that the Horn of Africa, northern China, and western India were drought-prone areas. Since it is difficult for national-level analyses to accurately identify the locations of drought-prone areas especially in large countries such as China and India, our analysis clarifies the importance of the use of the sub-national disaster information.