El Mediterráneo occidental como región clave para estudiar la relación entre el déficit de transporte de humedad y la ocurrencia de sequías

Abstract

Western Mediterranean is among the world regions where drought magnitude is projected to increase from 1850 to 2100 under a high anthropogenic emissions scenario, together with central America, southwestern South America, northern Brazil, the Amazon, northeastern Brazil, southern Africa, eastern Mediterranean, and southwestern Australia. We find the specific moisture sources of those regions and obtain their contribution to the precipitation for the period 1980-2018. We identify the dominant moisture source in each region, understood as the one whose contribution deficit maximises the drought probability. A variety of cases are found: in three regions the dominant source is the region itself, in one region it is the nearby terrestrial source, and in five regions it is an oceanic source. We find that the source that most contributes to the precipitation of a given region does not always coincide with its dominant one.