Currently, real-time satellite observations are available
within few hours to days from observation. This provides a
unique opportunity to create a real-time climate data record
with monthly or weakly updates as the observations becomes
available. We predict more efforts in future will be devoted
to combining data sets from different sensors or sources to
create long-term climate records. The authors acknowledge
that satellite data sets have biases and uncertainties that
could affect drought analysis. Similarly, numerical models
and even ground observations are subject to different levels
of uncertainty. Given that over many regions of the world
no other source of precipitation information is available,
satellite data sets cannot be ignored. The authors argue that
the presented data set is particularly important for drought
monitoring over remote and/or ungauged basins.