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Description: The Hutchinson Drought Index is a climatic drought index that represents both drought duration and intensity. It was designed to reflect agricultural droughts similarly to the well-known Palmner moisture balance drought index, but is simpler because it uses only rainfall data. The index was invented by Professor Mike Hutchinson at the ANU in 1992. This project includes R codes written by Ivan Hanigan and Lu Porfirio to extend the original method (by changing the thresholds at which droughts begin and end) and also to describe the calculations and download data to show as examples. The program on Github is freely available under the terms of the GNU General Public License (v2). The supporting information on the Open Science Framework is licensed by CC-BY 4.0 International Public License. Please cite the original 1992 paper as well as this web repository as: 1. Smith, D. I, Hutchinson, M. F, & McArthur, R. J. (1992) Climatic and Agricultural Drought: Payments and Policy. (Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia). http://fennerschool-research.anu.edu.au/spatio-temporal/publications/cres_paper1992.pdf 2. Hanigan, IC. 2012. The Hutchinson Drought Index Algorithm [Computer Software]. https://github.com/ivanhanigan/HutchinsonDroughtIndex Financial support was provided by Professor Tony McMichael's "Australia Fellowship" from the the National Health and Medical Research Council, via the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, Australian National University.