Climate of the Cordillera Blanca

Currently, the Cordillera Blanca (CB) hast lost about 38% of its glacier mass in the las four decades due to the effects of climate change. But what really changed? In the present chapter, a global to regional description of the CB’s climate is presented, and some important changes are assessed. A short to large spatio-temporal variability is assessed, and local impacts linked with some critical past conditions helped in the clarification of some specific documented cases. Furthermore, this chapter reviews the past climate of the CB and looks ahead to its future using the lastest generation of climate data products to assess some representative cases associated with specific mechanisms that will rule the future climate conditions over the CB. Some of the most relevant conclusions found is that the future precipitation variability in the CB is not yet well defined, the only confident behavior for the next decades is the absence of a clear trend; the CB cryosphere remains one of the last remaining tropical glacier bodies with significant paleoclimatic data, and the CB’s climate is characterized by a heterogenous cryosphere-atmosphere interaction, i.e., future projections suggest drier conditions in the northern CB compared to the southern CB.