This study aims at characterizing the response of hydrological basins of southern Piedmont (Italy) to meteorological drought that, through the “propagation” process, can evolve in hydrological drought, causing several damages to the economic and social sectors. More specifically, in this work we detect the correlation between meteorological and hydrological drought on a basin scale for catchments of different size. We select three direct tributaries of the Po River in southern Piedmont: Varaita, Maira and Tanaro rivers, the latter being much wider than the first two. First, we quantify the severity of the meteorological and hydrological droughts as independent phenomena, through the computation of two standardized indexes for the three basins from the last years of the 1990s to 2022 (availability of data).