Establishing and assessing the Integrated Surface Drought Index (ISDI) for agricultural drought monitoring in mid-eastern China

► We established a new drought monitoring method called Integrated Surface Drought Index (ISDI) based on the concept of the drought index called VegDRI. ► ISDI integrated multi-source data based on data mining technology. ► ISDI has high accuracy for drought monitoring in large-area as well as on the local scale. ► ISDI has good potentials for drought identification in China.