ABSTRACTIn order to find some regional climatic significance of glaciers mass balanse a statistical examination is made of the four longest published data series in the Alps: one located in France, two in Switzerland, and one in Austria. It is clear that much of the balance fluctuations for the different glaciers along the 500 km alpine chain can be explained by temporal correlation, to about 80% of the variance, while only 10% is explained by the geographical (spatial) distribution. This homogeneity in the mass balance fluctuations facilitates an analysis of glacier variations from the same climatic signal. The available data for Norway and Sweden indicate a regional variation similar to the alpine mechanism but with a more marked spatial dependence due clearly to the different distances inland from the coast. An other data set, 9 Russian glaciers for 16 years, gives us a very good test of the spatio temporal balance distribution. Finally two balance reconstructions are examined in order to find similarities between the Alps and Scandinavia on a century.