atmosphere Article Mechanisms for Severe Drought Occurrence in the Balsas River Basin (Mexico) Ana E. Melgarejo 1, Paulina Ordoñez 2,*, Raquel Nieto 3 , Cristina Peña-Ortiz 4, Ricardo García-Herrera 5,6 and Luis Gimeno 3 1 Posgrado en Ciencias de la Tierra, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City 04510, Mexico;
[email protected] 2 Centro de Ciencias de la Atmósfera, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City 04510, Mexico 3 Environmental Physics Laboratory (EPhysLab), CIM–UVigo, Universidade de Vigo, 32004 Ourense, Spain;
[email protected] (R.N.);
[email protected] (L.G.) 4 Departamento de Sistemas Físicos, Químicos y Naturales, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, 41013 Sevilla, Spain;
[email protected] 5 Departamento de Ciencias de la Tierra y Astrofísica, Facultad de Ciencias Físicas, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain; rgarciah@fis.ucm.es 6 Instituto de Geociencias (CSIC-UCM), 28040 Madrid, Spain * Correspondence:
[email protected] Abstract: This work provides an assessment of the two most intense seasonal droughts that occurred over the Balsas River Basin (BRB) in the period 1980–2017. The detection of the drought events was performed using the 6 month scale standardized precipitation–evapotranspiration index (SPEI-6) and the 6 month standardized precipitation index (SPI-6) in October. Both indices were quite similar during the studied period, highlighting the larger contribution of precipitation deficits vs. temperature excess to the drought occurrence in the basin. The origin of the atmospheric water Citation: Melgarejo, A.E.; Ordoñez, P.; Nieto, R.; Peña-Ortiz, C.; García- arriving to the BRB (1 May 1980–31 October 2017) was investigated by using a Lagrangian diagnosis Herrera, R.; Gimeno, L.