In 2016, the New South Wales (NSW) Department of Primary Industries (DPI) Climate Branch developed the Enhanced Drought Information System (EDIS) to improve the awareness, monitoring and forecasting of seasonal conditions across the state of NSW.  Since 2018, EDIS Mark I has been operationally monitoring the development of a major drought event and providing regional level information for many stakeholders.

EDIS ingests 5km2 gridded climate data from the Australian Water Availability Project (AWAP, managed by the Bureau of Meteorology), runs it through the DPI AgriMod crop-climate soil water balance model, and outputs meteorologic, hydrologic, and agronomic drought indices. These combine to form the Combined Drought Indicator, a classification system to identify five phases of drought based on rainfall effectiveness. 

In June 2019, Stage II of EDIS development began beta testing.  EDIS Mark II is re-engineered to ingest 1km2 gridded data from the ANUClimate dataset, which utilizes the latest interpolation schemes and high-level quality checks.  Despite ANUClimate data being 25x larger than AWAP, EDIS daily processing time has been reduced from 2 hours to 20 minutes using parallel computing and improved statistical methods, moving EDIS from a regional awareness tool into a framework for farm-level decision making.  Future development work will focus on forecasting and projection modules.

There has and continues to be considerable demand for information from EDIS, which is provided in the form of bespoke maps, time series figures, and raw data to internal and external stakeholders in government and industry.  As operations shift to EDIS Mark II, work is being scoped for extensive stakeholder engagement to help shape how farm-level drought information is delivered in the future. This will not only automate the process of responding to data requests, but allow a wider range of EDIS products to become freely and openly available to the general public.