Investigating climatic drivers of snow phenology by considering key-substage heterogeneity

•A new method is developed using a flexible scheme of substage division.•We find great spatial heterogeneity in dominant sub-periods affecting SCP changes.•The new method performed much better than the traditional one using a fixed scheme.•Climatic causes of all SCP hotspots were well identified using the new method.•Autumn cooling contributes to significant advanced trends in SSD hotspots of the ARC. Investigating the main climatic drivers responsible for changes in snow cover phenology (SCP) is crucial for making scientific countermeasures to ensure water resources security in global mountainous regions. However, most studies have explored drivers of SCP changes using a fixed substage division scheme and correlation analysis (referred to as the traditional method), potentially limiting reliability and accuracy in mountainous areas with complex terrain and climate. Here, a novel method is developed to efficiently identify main climatic drivers of SCP changes. This method employs a flexible scheme to account for the spatial heterogeneity of the dominant sub-period (the sub-period with the major climatic effect) in combination with regression analysis. Using the arid region of China as a case study, the new method was applied to three SCP parameters including snow cover days, snow start date, and snow end date, based on a seamless snow cover dataset from 2002 to 2019. The method’s effectiveness was evaluated by comparing it with the traditional method. The results indicate significant spatial heterogeneity in the dominant sub-period(s), closely associated with local temperature and elevation. The traditional method failed to accurately identify the main drivers of SCP changes, as evidenced by sub-region and elevation zone analyses showing adjusted coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.5) and exhibited better performances in predicting SCP changes. Thanks to the new method, climatic causes of SCP changes were successfully identified in 12 hotspots (regions with significant SCP changes), all with adjusted R2 > 0.5. The climatic causes were found to vary significantly across different hotspot regions and SCP parameters. The proposed method holds significant potential to enhance the reliability of analyses concerning main climatic drivers of SCP ch