Agricultural drought has caused huge loss in crop production in the recent decades and will continue to occur with increased frequency and severity in the upcoming future period. However, lack of reliable historic agricultural drought information at finer spatiotemporal resolutions constrains the effective formulation strategy for prevention and mitigation of agricultural drought, especially for monitoring and early/warming. Hence, we generated a 500 m-resolution agricultural drought area dataset with three degrees (drought covered, drought damaged, and crop failure) for summer-harvest crops and autumn-harvest crops encompassing the whole NCP.

Raster value of the dataset is the degree of relative agricultural drought, with the lower value representing the more severe drought.