A monthly, station-level drought event classifier for nine stations in Southeastern Australia (1994–2024). Phase 1 (R): SPI-3/12, NDVI/EVI prep, past-only labels.
Phase 2 (Python): chronological split, class-weighted Random Forest (AUC≈0.90), PR-curve thresholding, compact NN/ensembles comparisons.
Phase 3: transfer to unseen station; recalibration + light fine-tuning recovers recall while keeping ranking skill.