Tropical forests play a crucial role in the planet’s carbon cycle. There is growing evidence that the carbon sink of tropical forests is shifting towards a carbon source, and this is mainly driven by increasing tree mortality. As climate change leads to more frequent drought events, quantifying, understanding, and predicting their impact on tropical tree mortality becomes increasingly important. Currently, some major challenges are the limited availability of spatial and temporal ground-truth data on tropical tree mortality, and the non-linear relationship between drought and tree mortality. We will make use of recent advances in satellite imagery and a pantropical tree-ring network to overcome these challenges. More specifically, we will quantify the drought sensitivity of tropical tree mortality at the multi-tree and single-tree level, using an unprecedented combination of satellite imagery, inventory plot data and tree ring measurements. This estimated drought sensitivity of mortality will then be compared to the model output of Terrestrial Biosphere Models (TBMs), which are known to oversimplify tree mortality. The new insights on the tropical drought-mortality relationship resulting from this project will allow us to improve the implementation of mortality mechanisms in TBMs. This study will contribute to increasing our understanding and ability to predict the shifts in tropical forest dynamics under climate change.