How a neural network, reading weather backwards, warns of drought months in advance
At a weather station in Brazos County, Texas, rain is recorded on magnetic tape: every day, four years straight. Nine hundred millimeters in a good season, a hundred in a bad one. Then the tape falls silent. Drought creeps in without a sound — the slow fading of the earth's pulse. The standard SPI-3 index only catches on a month or two later, once the moisture is already gone.