Climate indices for everyone
Code developed by NIDIS for calculating various climate indices, which provide a geographical and temporal picture of the severity of precipitation and temperature anomalies.
- Palmer Drought Indicies (PDSI, scPDSI, Z-Index, PHDI)
- Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI)
- Standardised Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI)
- Potential EvapoTranspiration (PET)
- Percentage of Normal Precipitation (PNP)
Written in Python these modules can be used to compute indices corresponding to a specified climatological dataset (i.e. temperature and precipitation).
The base unit of computation is the time series of values for a location, and currently supported location types are grid cells and climate divisions.
Example processing scripts are included using NetCDF as the input/output format.
Processing parameters available include calibration period, month scales (for SPI, SPEI, and PNP), and choice of distribution fittings (gamma or Pearson III).