The US is obsessed with hydration. It’s pretty amazing how many people carry around water bottles compared to when I was growing up. So it makes sense that someone, somewhere, came up with a National Hydration Day.
There are many reasons this day makes no sense.
First of all, hydration is temporary. Hydrating an entire nation in one day does not increase national life expectancy.
Second, and I’m loath to get into vegetal politics here given that I have already been accused of “bashing vegetarians” this week by an anonymous reader online, but… Should humans really promote hogging water for themselves? Politically, I have to side with flora over fauna – at least when it comes to hydration
But as you can see, this celebratory day is as ridiculous as many others.
Unless, I suppose, you’re actually feeling parched today. In which case, hydration could save your life.
So today I decided to map US drought data from the most recent date available (June 9, 2026).
I first had GIS Dataset Doctor find the drought data across all US counties with a python script it wrote and also to determine the total area of different counties in different levels of drought. That was cool!
It also scraped some US Census data with that API to get populations and did a very rough, not-modeled equal population distribution analysis (i.e., definitely not overly accurate) of how many people were in different drought zones in each county.
It put it all in a single dataset for me and that was that.
I then asked Web Mapper to create a map that epitomizes dryness (hence the sandy/brown color scheme). And now we have a map showing which counties are parched today, on National Hydration Day, which have the most people likely/roughly living in parched areas, and where you can probably imbibe in hydrating today without feeling overly guilty… unless you aren’t into vegetal politics, in which case, I recommend drinking as much water as you like on any given day. 🙂
P.S. The bivariate legend doubles as a multi-select filter, and you can search for any county using a search menu.
Web Mapper Prompt (webmapgpt.com)
Please use the attached dataset(s) to design and create a map that fulfills the following, noting the caveats.
- Must show drought index severity by county.
- Must show what percentage of county is in different types of drought by area
- Should have a bivariate representation of this at some point
- Should be designed to look parched, dry, and very matter-of-fact scientific.
- Would be cool to include Puerto Rico too.
Can you use an Albers Equal Area map, though, with Alaska and Hawaii in the lower left? I don’t really care for leaflet. Unless this will cause massive loading problems or mobile campatibility issues. Also, for Mobile Versions: please design a simple header title and hamburger dropdown menu for all legends, sources, modal, etc., to be hidden under.