The State Climate Office of North Carolina released an article today describing some summer student research on drought indices they have undertaken.  You can read the article at https://climate.ncsu.edu/climateblog?id=150&h=5666e5c1.

The researcher looked at two different datasets of temperature and created a new drought index to compare to the standard Palmer Drought Severity Index to see how they compared.  The study showed that drought has been increasing since 1930 in both datasets but that the new index had lower amount of drought overall.

NC pdsi graph