Get involved
You can get involved in the NSW drought monitoring program by:
Farm Tracker mobile application
Use a convenient mobile app to collect observations and photos of conditions on your farm and share these with the NSW Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development. It provides valuable information for verifying drought indicators and is published in the NSW State Seasonal Update. Find out more about the Farm Tracker app here.
Seasonal Conditions Monitoring Network
Host high quality monitoring technology on your farm. Enjoy the benefits of having your own weather, climate and soil moisture monitoring. Share this data with NSW Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development to improve the national climate network, verify the drought indicators as well as test and develop new services. If you are interested in hosting monitoring technology contact seasonal.conditions@dpird.nsw.gov.au. Please note the SCMN is not in an active phase of expansion.
Accessing Data
Want to access drought and climate data?
Standard free monthly release
On the Seasonal Conditions Information Portal you can obtain:
- high quality images of the CDI map and drought timeseries,
- geospatial data for NSW parishes and Local Government areas (.shp, .csv)
These data sets are made freely available after the release of the NSW State Seasonal Update on the 15th of each month. All data is provided under the open Creative Commons Licence BY 4.0.
Customised requests and services
A wide variety of data and services can be obtained from the EDIS system through the customised request service. Some examples include .asc, .json and .nc files.
- Are you a developer? DPIRD is releasing a new NSW Drought-API where you can integrate the parish CDI time series or map into your own dashboards and products.
- Contact us about accessing Australia wide near real-time climate data (ANUClimate).
- To express your interest in a customised data set or service email: seasonal.conditions@dpird.nsw.gov.au.
Please note: Our customised data services come with a fee or subscription, particularly large requests or ongoing automated services. This reflects the amount of time and computing resource needed.
All customised data require the user to sign a data licencing agreement.