Reproducible Code for "Does Winter Snowpack Predict Snowmelt Timing? A Case Study in Western Canada's Mountains"

This repository contains the reproducible research code associated with the manuscript “Does Winter Snowpack Predict Snowmelt Timing? A Case Study in Western Canada’s Mountains.” The study investigates the predictability of snowmelt timing across 2,708 mountain grid cells in western Canada using ERA5-Land data (1951–2026), independent snow observations, and large-scale climate indices. The computational framework includes a 46-year rolling-origin hindcast, four forecasting models (ridge regression, LightGBM, U-Net, and ConvLSTM), and a snowpack-referenced verification approach designed to distinguish genuine predictive information from persistence of observed snow conditions. The code supports data preprocessing, snowpack and snowmelt indicator calculations, model training and evaluation, probabilistic hotspot verification using PSSnew, predictor-ablation experiments, statistical significance testing, and generation of the study's figures and results. The repository is intended to facilitate reproducibility, independent verification, methodological benchmarking, and further research on seasonal snowmelt predictability, climate–snow interactions, and hydrological forecasting in mountainous regions.