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Snow cover occupies large percentage of land surface in Tibetan Plateau. Snow cover duration (SCD) during non-growing seasons plays a critical role in regulating alpine vegetations phenology by affecting the energy budgets of land surface and soil moisture conditions. Different periods snow cover during non-growing season may have distinct effect on the vegetations phenology. Start of season (SOS) has been observed advanced under the ongoing climate change in the plateau, but it still remains unclear how the SCD alters the SOS. This study attempts to answer the following questions: (i) What is the pattern of spatial and temporal variations for SCD and grassland SOS? (ii) Which periods SCD plays a critical role in grasslands SOS?

The remote sensing datasets from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) were utilized to compute the SOS and SCD on the Tibetan Plateau over 200315. The Asymmetric Gaussian function was applied to extract SOS. We also explored the spatial pattern and temporal variation of SOS and SCD. Then, by using linear correlation coefficients, we investigated the driving effects of different periods non-growing season SCD on SOS.

The non-growing season SCD slightly decreased during 200315, while SOS exhibited an overall advancing trend. Advanced trends in SOS were observed in the eastern plateau, and the delayed trends were mainly founded in western plateau. Snow cover area exhibited two separate peaks during autumn and late winter over the plateau. Extended SCD regions mainly distributed in middle-east of the plateau, while shrunken SCD distributed in other regions of the plateau. SCD of different seasons caused distinct effects on vegetation SOS. Lengthened autumn SCD advanced SOS over the eastern plateau. The slightly lengthened SCD postponed SOS over the western plateau. In the wet meadow regions, advanced SOS was positively associated with SCD during the entire non-growing season, whereas for the dry steppe, SCD over the preseason played a more dominant role. The SCD of previous autumn and winter also showed lag effect on SOS over meadow regions to a certain extent. This study confirmed the importance of SCD to phenological processes at the beginning of growing season and further suggested that role of SCD should be discriminated for different periods and for different heat-water conditions. With the lag effects and SCDs distinct effect of different seasons considered, predictions on the Tibetan Plateaus spring phenology could be improved.