In recent years, regional and global climate models
have been extensively used to study droughts and their
causes. The presented observation-driven drought data is
model-independent and can be used a validation and
verification data set. Finally, climate change and its impacts
on extreme climate events including droughts has been the
subject of numerous studies most of which are based on
climate simulations. The presented satellite-based data sets
provide the opportunity to investigate changes in patterns and
severity of droughts over the past three decades. The entire
record of data sets, presented in this study, (1979–present) can
be made available to interested researchers upon request.