District-Level Combined Drought Index and Cereal Production Data for Somalia, 2001 to 2025

This dataset supports the study "Stable in the Mean, Acute in Effect: Drought Variability and the Threshold Sensitivity of Cereal Production across Somali Districts, 2001 to 2025." It comprises two linked components covering Somalia at the district level. The first is a monthly drought record derived from the FAO-SWALIM Combined Drought Index (CDI) for 73 districts from January 2001 to December 2025, giving 21,827 district-month observations after removal of duplicate records. For each district-month it contains the Combined Drought Index and its three constituent components, the precipitation, temperature, and vegetation indices, together with the underlying satellite rainfall and land-surface-temperature fields. Lower index values denote drier conditions. These series were converted to deseasonalised anomalies for the trend and variability analysis. The second is a seasonal cereal production record derived from FSNAU data for the 45 crop-growing districts, covering maize and sorghum output in metric tonnes for the Gu and Deyr seasons from 2001 to 2025. Production totals were reconstructed to give complete coverage across all 25 years. All 45 crop districts match the drought-record district names exactly. For the impact analysis, the monthly drought index was aggregated to each growing season per district and year, retaining the seasonal mean, minimum, maximum, and within-season standard deviation, and joined to production on district, year, and season. The resulting analysis panel contains 1,777 district-season observations across 45 districts and forms the basis of the fixed-effects and threshold regressions reported in the paper. The data derive from publicly available institutional sources: the Combined Drought Index from FAO-SWALIM (faoswalim.org) and cereal production from FSNAU (fsnau.org).