francis meloche, Benjamin Imbach, Jean-Benoit Madore, Benjamin Reuter, Alexandre Langlois, Francis Gauthier

This study provides a comprehensive analysis of the snow and avalanche climate of the Chic-Chocs region of the Gaspé Peninsula, located in the northeastern Appalachians of eastern Canada. The data revealed two major components of the snow climate: a cold snow cover combined with a maritime influence causing melt/ice layers through rain-on-snow events. The CRCM6-SNOWPACK model chain was good at representing the seasonal mean of climatic indicators, snow grain size and a snow problem type that well represented the snow climate of the study region. The global comparison shows that the snow climate is different from other areas in western North America, but similar to Mt. Washington (New Hampshire, USA) and central Japan. We show a clustering based solely on avalanche problem types, which showed that the onset date of wet snow problems divided most of the winter into three clusters. We compare these clusters with the French Alps and show some similarities, moving away from a traditional snow climate description. The paper concludes that the use of advanced snow cover modeling represents a new potential framework to improve our understanding and classification of snow climates, ultimately contributing to improved forecasting and risk management in similar regions.