“A bill to reauthorize the National Integrated Drought Information System Act of 2006, and for other purposes.”
No CRS summary available for this bill.
This section revises the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS), administered by NOAA's Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere to provide drought early warnings, forecasts, impacts assessments, and related data to federal, state, local, tribal, and private entities to reduce drought-related economic losses and risks. Specifically, it (1) eliminates the prior requirement to implement NIDIS through the National Weather Service and other specified NOAA programs; (2) expands NIDIS functions to incorporate flash drought research and tools, support subseasonal-to-seasonal precipitation and temperature forecasting and low-flow predictions, advance artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cloud technologies for monitoring and forecasting, utilize specified observational networks, refine drought indicators, improve decision-support products, optimize federal data resources, address data gaps (e.g., snowpack, soil moisture, groundwater, rapid intensification events), and leverage existing NOAA entities for water coordination; (3) authorizes NIDIS partnerships with the National Mesonet Program to establish memoranda of understanding for high-quality data; and (4) directs development, within one year of enactment, of a plan to integrate existing NOAA drought products and advanced modeling into probabilistic forecasts. This section also authorizes appropriations for NIDIS of $15 million for FY2026, $15.5 million for FY2027, $16 million for FY2028, $16.5 million for FY2029, and $17 million for FY2030.