atniclimate/dynamic-drought-module (the running version is stamped in
the application footer)
An embeddable, serverless web map for seeing drought conditions anywhere in the United States and understanding what they mean for a place: current drought status, wildfire and extreme heat risk, water and snowpack telemetry, and the public resources that address the impacts, routed by the place a user selects. Built by ATNI Climate (Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians) with a Pacific Northwest (PNW) focus and a national framing.
For a deployer, the module is a static folder. Build it once, serve it
from any web host, embed it in any page with an <iframe>. There is no
backend, no account, no tracking, no analytics, and no proprietary tile
provider. Every view is a shareable URL.
Stewardship comes first. The module is built so each deployer (a
Tribal Nation, a state agency, a partner) controls its own copy on its own
infrastructure. Sovereign-jurisdiction data is never redistributed by this
repository. The live Tribal-geography layers (Tribal Lands, Reservation
Boundaries, Treaty & Ceded Lands) are fetched LIVE from the publishing
federal services at view time, held only in the browser session, and never
bundled; requests run with cache: 'no-store' so nothing persists beyond
the session. Separately, two deployer-owned slots (tribal, treaty)
ship as empty placeholders a deployer may populate with its own authorized
data; they appear in the interface only when turned on by URL (see the
layer table below).
Treaty boundaries. Agency polygons are a representation of Treaty cession areas, not a definitive depiction of Tribal jurisdiction. Treaty rights and Tribal sovereignty are matters of sovereign authority. Verify with the relevant Tribal Nation before using these polygons for any decision-making.
License: PolyForm Strict License 1.0.0. ATNI Climate, The Affiliated
Tribes of Northwest Indians, holds the rights. Noncommercial use is
permitted; selling or modifying the software requires explicit written
permission from ATNI Climate with provenance tracking. See LICENSE,
including the additional ATNI permission that covers noncommercial
self-hosting and data population.
- Condition surfaces (one at a time, so they never fight visually): the US Drought Monitor (USDM), the gridded Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) with a 30-to-365-day window selector, the NOAA Climate Prediction Center (CPC) Seasonal Drought Outlook, NWS HeatRisk, the Storm Prediction Center fire-weather outlook, and USDA Forest Service Wildfire Hazard Potential.
- Place (the reference boundaries that say where you are and whose land you are looking at): state boundaries, EPA Omernik Level III and Level IV ecoregions, rivers, and the Tribal Nations umbrella: Tribal Lands (live from the US Census AIANNH service, covering legal AND statistical geographies including Oklahoma Tribal Statistical Areas), Reservation Boundaries (live from the authoritative Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) AIAN-LAR service), and Treaty & Ceded Lands (live from the US Forest Service digitized Royce cessions; off by default, it joins via the Tribal Nations button, its own toggle, or a click on a Tribal boundary, which highlights that Tribe's related cessions and says plainly when none are on file). Where two agencies depict the same land the overlap is drawn legibly as two labeled representations, never blended. Deployers can additionally load their own Tribal Lands and Treaty Areas data into two default-off slots (URL-addressed; not shown in the default interface).
- Events: active wildfire perimeters (National Interagency Fire Center) and active National Weather Service (NWS) heat and fire-weather alerts.
- Stations: live water and snowpack telemetry with values in the sidebar and popups: USGS streamgages, NRCS SNOTEL snowpack, USBR Hydromet reservoir storage and AgriMet agricultural observations, and USACE reservoir forebay elevations.
- The impact briefing: click any boundary (a state, an ecoregion, a Tribal or reservation boundary) and the module composes a briefing for that place: land identity, current / near-term / long-range drought impact with wildfire and extreme heat foregrounded, the seasonal water-supply outlook, the El Nino / Southern Oscillation (ENSO) tilt, and public resources routed in stewardship order (the Tribe's own resources first, then federal, then state).
- View presets: five question-first chips ("Right now", "This week", "Season ahead", "Fire risk", "Whose land") that set the layer stack for the question being asked, without locking it.
Every layer reports an honest status in the sidebar (loading, live,
live (partial), unavailable, no data, zoom in to load); a failed
or truncated upstream shows an honest pill, never a silent blank and
never an unqualified live.
git clone https://github.com/atniclimate/dynamic-drought-module.git
cd dynamic-drought-module
npm install
npm run dev
# open http://localhost:5173/dynamic-drought-module/Production build:
npm run build
# emits dist/
npm run preview
# preview the production build at http://localhost:4173/The deployed site lives at
https://atniclimate.github.io/dynamic-drought-module/ and is rebuilt on
every push to main via .github/workflows/deploy.yml. Deployers
self-hosting on their own infrastructure run npm run build and serve the
resulting dist/ from any static web host.
The application reads window.location.search on load, both for direct
visits and for embedded iframes. The Share view button copies the
current URL.
| Param | Values | Default |
|---|---|---|
region |
washington_state, columbia_snake_basin, cascades, central_oregon, southwest_washington, south_puget_sound, national, alaska, hawaii |
washington_state |
layers |
comma-separated keys from the table below | usdm,aiannh,bia-reservations,states |
select |
state:<postal code> (for example state:WA): opens the map focused on that boundary with its impact briefing open; applied once, then dropped from the URL |
none |
embed |
true or 1 (hides the sidebar for clean iframe presentation) |
false |
Display-state parameters also round-trip (view for the Brief/console
mode, week for the USDM archive, dmode, sst, outlook, basemap);
the authoritative grammar for every parameter is
docs/URL_SCHEMA_POLICY.md. Old shared links keep working: tribal is
still a valid key (now the deployer-data slot, off by default and not
shown in the default interface; naming it in layers turns it on and
reveals its toggle), and legacy layer lists resolve deterministically.
Because condition surfaces render one at a time, a layers list naming
several surfaces resolves deterministically to the first surface named
(older shared links keep working).
<iframe
src="https://atniclimate.github.io/dynamic-drought-module/?select=state:WA&embed=true"
width="100%" height="600"
style="border:1px solid #243049; border-radius:6px;"
loading="lazy"
title="Drought, wildfire, and heat conditions">
</iframe>| Key | Layer | Role | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
usdm |
US Drought Monitor | surface | NDMC FeatureServer (live) |
gridded-index |
Gridded Drought Index (SPI) | surface | NOAA NIDIS raster tiles (live) |
drought |
Seasonal Drought Outlook | surface | NOAA CPC WMS (live) |
heatrisk |
HeatRisk · Today (Experimental) | surface | NOAA NWS/WPC ImageServer (live) |
spc-fire-weather |
Fire Weather Outlook (Day 1) | surface | NOAA SPC MapServer (live) |
usfs-whp |
Wildfire Hazard Potential | surface | USFS GeoPlatform ImageServer (live) |
states |
State Boundaries | reference | US Census, bundled GeoJSON |
ecoregions |
Ecoregions (Level III/IV) | reference | EPA Omernik, bundled PMTiles |
aiannh |
Tribal Lands | reference | US Census AIANNH MapServer (live, default-on) |
bia-reservations |
Reservation Boundaries | reference | BIA AIAN-LAR FeatureServer (live, default-on) |
treaty-cessions |
Treaty & Ceded Lands | reference | USFS Royce cessions MapServer (live, default-off; also loads from a Tribal-boundary click) |
tribal |
Tribal Lands (your own data) | reference | deployer slot, bundled EMPTY PLACEHOLDER, default-off, URL-only (no catalog row until turned on) |
treaty |
Treaty Areas (your own data) | reference | deployer slot, bundled EMPTY PLACEHOLDER, default-off, URL-only (no catalog row until turned on) |
hydrography |
Rivers | reference | OpenStreetMap via Overpass (live) |
nifc-fires |
Active Wildfires | event | NIFC WFIGS FeatureServer (live) |
nws-alerts |
Heat & Fire Weather Alerts | event | NOAA NWS MapServer (live) |
telemetry |
Telemetry Stations | stations | USGS, NRCS, USBR, USACE (live) |
Every live endpoint in src/config/urls.ts carries a verification
metadata block (HTTP status, content type, CORS posture, response-shape
caveats, verification date). Read it before touching a fetcher.
The three live Tribal-geography layers (aiannh, bia-reservations,
treaty-cessions) fetch the publishing federal services live at view
time and redistribute nothing: responses are held in session memory
only, requested with cache: 'no-store', and are never bundled, baked,
or written to disk by this module. Each popup names its publishing
agency, its vintage, and the representation caveat. The two present-day
layers are on by default; Treaty & Ceded Lands (the historical Royce
record) is off by default and joins via the Tribal Nations button, its
own toggle, or a click on a Tribal Lands or Reservation Boundaries
feature, which highlights the cessions related to that Tribe when a
safe name match exists and says plainly when no cession is on file
(absence in Royce is not evidence that a Tribe lacks a Treaty
relationship).
The tribal and treaty keys are the DEPLOYER slots: bundled empty
FeatureCollection placeholders (in public/data/), off by default,
that a deployer may populate with its own authorized data (a Tribal
Nation's own boundary data, under its own governance). They are not part
of the default interface: no catalog row or search result names them
until a ?layers=tribal / ?layers=treaty URL (or a deployer's own
configuration) turns them on. Their popups label the data as
deployer-provided. If you populate a slot with data that
duplicates one of the live federal layers, consider toggling that live
layer off in your embed links to avoid a confusing double-draw; the two
are deliberately separate so your data never silently replaces or blends
with a federal representation. Conversion commands and population
instructions are in public/data/README.md.
The basemap is OpenStreetMap standard raster tiles, subdued via raster paint so the condition surfaces dominate. No proprietary tile providers, ever. Hydrography queries the volunteer-run Overpass API (three-mirror failover, viewport-driven, dormant below zoom 7); institutional deployments expecting heavy concurrency should plan for the planned National Hydrography Dataset PMTiles bundle.
Most sources serve the browser directly. Two do not (USBR Hydromet and
the NWRFC water-supply CSV have no CORS), and one is flaky enough to want
a retry path (NRCS AWDB). The Worker in workers/proxy/ is a CORS shim
with a strict allow-list; it adds a header and changes nothing else.
Deploy it with wrangler and set URLS.workerProxy to enable those
sources; without it, the module still runs and reports those values
honestly as unavailable.
- No backend. The static
dist/folder is the entire production deployment; the optional Worker is a CORS shim, not application logic. - URL-as-state. Region, active layers, selection, and the embed flag round-trip through the URL; every view is shareable and embeddable.
- One surface at a time. Condition surfaces are mutually exclusive by construction; place, events, and stations stack over the active surface.
- Lazy loading with honest status. Layers load on first toggle-on and
report six canonical states; a data failure keeps the layer checked
with an honest
unavailablepill (a shared link never silently loses a layer because an upstream blipped), and a truncated response readslive (partial), never an unqualifiedlive. - Cancellable network operations. Master abort signal plus per-call timeout on every non-trivial fetch; late responses to superseded operations are dropped, not rendered.
- Live-fetch stewardship. Sovereign-jurisdiction geography is never redistributed: the federal representations are fetched live per session (no-store), and the deployer-owned slots ship empty for population under the deployer's own authorizations.
- Mobile and accessibility. The sidebar stacks above the map below 720 pixels; region selection is arrow-key navigable; status changes are announced through a polite live region; embed semantics survive collapse and expand.
| Want to change... | Edit in |
|---|---|
| Region bounds or names | src/config/regions.ts (REGIONS) |
| Layer registry and default-on set | src/config/layers.ts (LAYER_DEFS) |
| View presets | src/config/presets.ts (VIEW_PRESETS) |
| Colors and palettes | src/config/palette.ts |
| Telemetry stations | src/config/telemetry.ts |
| Endpoint URLs and the Worker base | src/config/urls.ts |
| Brand text and styles | index.html header, src/styles/app.css |
This repository carries the deployable source: the application, its bundled assets, the optional Cloudflare Worker, and the automations that keep the live site current. Development planning, the change ledger, and the test suite are maintained in a private working repository; releases land here with version tags. Questions, problem reports, and contribution proposals are welcome through GitHub issues.
Any evergreen browser (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari 14 or newer). MapLibre GL JavaScript requires WebGL 1.
Copyright (c) 2026 ATNI Climate, The Affiliated Tribes of Northwest
Indians (ATNI). This project is licensed under the PolyForm Strict
License 1.0.0 (see LICENSE): noncommercial entities may use the
software; selling it, modifying it, or building new works on it requires
explicit written permission from ATNI Climate, granted with
provenance-tracking conditions (attribution preserved, changes documented
and disclosed to ATNI). The LICENSE file carries an additional ATNI
permission allowing noncommercial deployers to host unmodified copies and
populate the data placeholders and configuration tables for their own
deployment; that permission is what makes the self-hosting pattern in
this README work.
Data layers provided by sovereign Tribal Nations, state agencies, and federal entities retain their respective public-domain or specific-use licenses. Ensure you have authorization to redistribute any bundled reference polygons.