Dynamic identification of snow phenology in the Northern Hemisphere

Wang, Le; Miao, Xin; Hu, Xinyun; Li, Yizhuo; Qiu, Bo; Ge, Jun; Guo, Weidong

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-19-2733-2025

Articles | Volume 19, issue 7

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-19-2733-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-19-2733-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 19, issue 7

Research article

|

31 Jul 2025

Research article |

| 31 Jul 2025

Dynamic identification of snow phenology in the Northern Hemisphere

Le Wang, Xin Miao, Xinyun Hu, Yizhuo Li, Bo Qiu, Jun Ge, and Weidong Guo

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-19-2733-2025-supplement

Data sets

IMS Daily Northern Hemisphere Snow and Ice Analysis at 1 km, 4 km, and 24 km Resolutions U.S. National Ice Center https://doi.org/10.7265/N52R3PMC

MODIS/Terra Snow Cover 8-Day L3 Global 0.05Deg CMG D. K. Hall and G. A. Riggs https://doi.org/10.5067/MODIS/MOD10C2.006

Long-term series of daily global snow depth (1979–2017) T. Che et al. https://doi.org/10.11888/Snow.tpdc.270925

Long-term series of daily snow depth dataset in China (1979-2024) T. Che et al. https://doi.org/10.11888/Geogra.tpdc.270194

Elevation dataset of the Third pole (2013) A. National https://data.tpdc.ac.cn/en/data/ddf4108a-d940-47ad-b25c-03666275c83a

Short summary

Snow phenology is a crucial indicator for assessing seasonal changes in snow. In this work, we find that snow phenology is significantly impacted by the datasets and methods used, and current methods often overlook the spatial and temporal variability in snow across the Northern Hemisphere. To address this, we develop a dynamic-threshold method, which contributes to better representing the seasonal changes in snow cover across the Northern Hemisphere, especially on the Tibetan Plateau.