❄️ SnowC2: Snow Cover Heterogeneity and Its Impact on the Climate and Carbon Cycle of Arctic Regions

🌐 Overview

The SnowC2 project is part of an ESA Climate Change Initiative (CCI) Research Fellowship awarded to Mickaël Lalande and hosted at Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR) under the supervision of Christophe Kinnard and Alexandre Roy (RIVE / GLACIOLAB, Trois-Rivières, Canada), in collaboration with Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC).

The goal of SnowC2 is to improve our understanding of the spatial heterogeneity of snow cover in Arctic regions and its representation in process-based models, enabling more robust simulations of snow cover, surface energy, and carbon fluxes under current and future climate conditions.

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⚡ Two Phases of SnowC2

1️⃣ Phase 1 – 1D Model Development and Evaluation

• Focus: Enhancing the 1D physics of the CLASSIC (v1.8) snow model for Arctic snowpacks with in situ assessment.
• Paper: "Improving the CLASSIC (v1.8) Snow Model to Better Simulate Arctic Snowpacks" (Lalande et al., in prep, to be submitted to GMD).
• Code: CLASSIC-SnowC2-1D
• This repo: Contains scripts for analyses, validation, and figure generation (CLASSIC/in_situ/).

2️⃣ Phase 2 – 2D Spatial Simulations Across the Arctic

• Focus: Large-scale Arctic simulations with improved snow cover fraction (SCF) parameterizations.
• Goal: Evaluate spatial heterogeneity impacts on surface energy and carbon fluxes using Snow CCI datasets.
• (Details will be updated in this repository as this work progresses.)

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🙏 Acknowledgments

This project is supported by the ESA Climate Change Initiative and Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR).