Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci., 20, 1353–1367, 2020 https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-20-1353-2020 © Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Geo-climatic hazards in the eastern subtropical Andes: distribution, climate drivers and trends Iván Vergara1, Stella M. Moreiras2,3, Diego Araneo2,4, and René Garreaud5,6 1CONICET-IPATEC, Bariloche, 8400, Argentina 2CONICET-IANIGLA, Mendoza, 5500, Argentina 3Department of Agricultural Sciences, National University of Cuyo, Mendoza, 5502, Argentina 4Department of Exact and Natural Sciences, National University of Cuyo, Mendoza, 5502, Argentina 5Department of Geophysics, University of Chile, Santiago, 8330015, Chile 6Center for Climate and Resilience Research, Santiago, 8320198, Chile Correspondence: Iván Vergara (
[email protected]) Received: 12 November 2019 – Discussion started: 21 January 2020 Revised: 27 March 2020 – Accepted: 30 March 2020 – Published: 20 May 2020 Abstract. Detecting and understanding historical changes in 1 Introduction the frequency of geo-climatic hazards (G-CHs) is crucial for the quantification of current hazards and project them into Geo-climatic hazards are natural phenomena that occur by the future. Here we focus in the eastern subtropical Andes a combination of atmospheric (e.g. precipitation, temper- (32–33◦ S), using meteorological data and a century-long in- ature, wind) and terrain (geotechnical and morphometric ventory of 553 G-CHs triggered by rainfall or snowfall. We properties) factors. This definition includes landslides, snow first analyse their spatio-temporal distributions and the role avalanches and phenomena of glacial (surges, glacier lake of climate variability in the year-to-year changes in the num- outburst floods – GLOFs, ice-dammed lake outburst floods ber of days per season with G-CHs.