ABSTRACT : In many tropical countries, topographic and climatic conditions favor the installation of hydropower infrastructure, considered cleaner and with fewer environmental impacts than other alternatives for power generation. In recent decades, multiple neotropical watersheds have been targeted for reservoir building. These developments generally result in changes on surface characteristics over large areas, including not only the establishment of new water bodies, but also modifications in land use and vegetation cover in surrounding areas. These changes can potentially lead to atmospheric and ecological changes that may result in unaccounted environmental consequences of this kind of infrastructure. Understanding and assessing these impacts is important in countries like Colombia, where approximately 70% of the nation’s electricity comes from hydropower generation, with multiple projects built and put into operation over the last decade. In this work, we use a suite of remote sensing products to characterize changes in surface energy balance in the surroundings of three recently installed (Ituango, Quimbo and Topocoro) and one older (Betania) hydropower projects in the tropical Andes of Colombia. We compare the response of LAI, NDVI, energy budget components and temperature, precipitation, humidity and wind speed before and after the establishment of reservoir lakes using MODIS, CERES, GLDAS and CHRS data. Overall, our results indicate changes in albedo due reservoir filling only in flooded areas, as the result of the change in land cover (replacing land vegetation with a water body), but with no significant effects on temperature and precipitation over non flooded areas. In fact, these changes are not strong enough to significantly modify surface energy budgets in surrounding areas beyond the flooded areas, nor to move beyond other changes in land use. In addition, due to the humid climate in this region, changes in energy budget do not alter precipitation regimes significantly, agreeing with previous studies that indicate that this changes are only significant in arid and semiarid regions. Our results highlight the utility of remotely-sensed products to assess the collective effects of major surface changes such as those produced by large infrastructure projects on local-to-regional energy balances and their associated ecological, hydrological and atmospheric consequences.