Fig. 2: Long-term inter-annual variability of moisture convergence and precipitation over CESA.

a Time series of mean annual anomalies over CESA of daily accumulated precipitation (gray line, mm), and daily accumulated precipitation due to vertically integrated moisture convergence (blue bars, mm) and due to moisture recycling (orange bars, mm). The bold lines depict the respective time series filtered by a 10-year low pass Lanczos filter. Light orange and blue background colors highlight decadal periods defined by drier and wetter condition, respectively. b Anomaly composites (regarding the 1981–2010 climatology) of IVT obtained considering the mean observed conditions during the 2019–2022 drought period (color shading, \({kg}.{m}^{-1}.{s}^{-1}\)), and direction (vector – only the statistically significant anomalies at a 5% level are shown according to the Student’s two-tailed t test). c Anomaly composites for the 2019–2022 period of the vertical integral of divergence of moisture flux (color shading, \({mm}.{s}^{-1}\)) and of the divergent wind field at the 850hPa level (vectors, \(m.{s}^{-1}\)). Blue and magenta contours delimitate regions covered by positive and negative anomalies of the daily evaporation minus precipitation balance, respectively. Red dots in b and c mark the statistically significant anomalies at a 5% level according to the Student’s two-tailed t test.