Can I calculate Agricultural drought through RDIT?

Notice: A new tool to calculate agricultural drought is published. You can find it in this link: Drought Monitor And Prediction


No, if you attention to the complete name of RDIT (Rain-based Drought Indices Tool), you can understand that via the tool you can just calculate the meteorological rain base drought indices. If you want to monitor agricultural drought indices, you should refer to DMAP (Drought Monitor And Prediction) software.

This software can calculate eight indices of meteorological drought. All the rain-based drought indices which are calculated by RDIT are including: SPI (Standardized Precipitation Index), DI (Deciles Index), PN (Percent of Normal Index), CZI (China-Z Index), MCZI (Modified CZI), EDI (Effective drought Index), RAI (Rainfall Anomaly Index), and ZSI (Z-score Index), just are used precipitation data in their formula.

Furthermore, in the RDIT tool you can calculate severity and duration of drought events. These are two most important characteristics of the drought event which is happened in a region. You can draw graphs and estimate severity, onset, and end of each period’s drought. Input and output data are in excel format file. For input data, RDIT is smart. It can assess your data and check blank cells and produce data for "null" cells. By plotting various graphs, this software can help to the users for better interpreting the results.