Monthly satellite-driven drought risk intelligence for Kenya's arid and semi-arid lands — 26 years of data, three independent signals, and a 90-day forward view your team can act on before conditions deteriorate.
Each month, three independent satellite data streams are ingested, validated against historical baselines, and fused into a single county-level risk score. If one signal misfires, the others catch it. A genuine drought registers across all three simultaneously.
MODIS Terra measures the ratio of near-infrared to red light reflected by the land surface — a precise measure of how much green biomass is actively photosynthesising. We compute the monthly anomaly against the 2000–2015 climatological baseline. Browning below normal is one of drought's earliest fingerprints, detectable weeks before ground reports confirm the situation.
As soil moisture depletes, evaporative cooling fails. Land surfaces run 8–12°C above their seasonal baseline during severe drought. During Kenya's 2011 crisis, northern counties recorded LST anomalies exceeding +10°C before food insecurity was officially declared. MODIS 8-day composites are aggregated to monthly and quality-masked to remove cloud-contaminated pixels.
The 3-month SPI measures accumulated rainfall deficit against a 1981–2010 baseline using Gamma distribution fitting — the WMO standard methodology. SPI-3 captures whether Kenya's bimodal rainfall seasons are delivering sufficient moisture to sustain pastoral and agricultural systems, with the 3-month window matching drought onset timing in ASAL counties.
How the signals become a score. Each signal anomaly is normalised within each county's own seasonal history — Turkana in dry season is assessed against Turkana's dry-season record, not against wetter counties. The three normalised stress values are fused using seasonally-adjusted weights and multiplied against a county-level Vulnerability-Exposure Index (population, livestock, water access, cropland dependency, adaptive capacity). The result is the RCII and the RRIS — both on a 0–1 scale.
Every monthly run produces three outputs from the same underlying risk data. Your PDF briefing, your dashboard, and your data feed always tell the same story — because they come from a single validated pipeline.
Executive summary with KPI tiles and AMBER-tier alert cards. Full county risk matrix. Signal decomposition charts showing what is driving each county's score this month. 25-year historical RRIS trends with documented drought event markers. Full methodology note. Designed to forward directly to boards, government counterparts, and field partners.
Machine-readable JSON and CSV with RRIS scores, risk tiers, 30/60/90-day forecast classes, confidence levels, affected population figures, and decision trigger text for all 10 counties. Validated against 14 schema checks before release. Consumable by risk platforms, insurance pricing engines, and early warning dashboards via direct API integration.
A browser-based choropleth map of all 10 ASAL counties colour-coded by risk tier. Click any county for its full risk profile: RRIS, RCII hazard, VEI vulnerability, forecast table, affected population, and decision trigger. Embeddable in client portals, shareable as a 96 KB standalone file, readable on any device without installation.
The RCII is built for organisations that must act before a drought crisis peaks. Each risk tier carries a specific decision mandate — not just a colour, but a clear instruction.
The value of drought intelligence is front-loaded. The organisations that benefit most are those that make decisions weeks before a crisis becomes visible on the ground.
Activate index-insurance triggers at the right moment. The RCII gives you a 90-day view on which counties are approaching trigger conditions — ahead of fieldwork season and claims peaks.
Flag climate-exposed loan portfolios before borrowers default. County-level RRIS scores map directly to agricultural and pastoral livelihood exposure across ASAL portfolio geographies.
Move from reactive to anticipatory. Monthly briefings let you pre-position logistics and brief rapid-response teams while there is still time to act cost-effectively — before emergency declarations.
A consistent, satellite-based early warning signal that complements ground-based monitoring. Monthly county briefings ready to share with county drought management committees.
We'll send you the complete demonstration package — the same PDF, data feed, and interactive dashboard your team would receive every month.
Kenya ASAL · Eastern Africa · RCII v2.0 · roxr.earth