Although the drought impacts are comparably not catastrophic, the results from the drought are fatal in various social and economical aspects. Different from other natural hazards including floods, drought advances slowly and spreads widely, so that the preparedness is quite important and effective to mitigate the impacts from drought. Soil moisture depletion directly resulted from rainfall shortage is highly related with drought, especially for crops and vegetations, therefore a drought can be evaluated using soil moisture conditions. In this study, SMI (Soil Moisture Index) was developed to measure a drought condition using soil moisture model and frequency analysis for return periods. Runs theory was applied to quantify the soil moisture depletions for the drought condition in terms of severity, magnitude and duration. In 1994, 1995, 2000, and 2001, Korea had experienced several severe droughts, so the SMI developed was applied to evaluate applicability in the mid-range hydrologic unit watershed scale. From the results, SMI demonstrated the drought conditions with a quite sensitive manner and can be used as an indicator to measure a drought condition.