Vegetation phenology plays an important role in regulating land-atmosphere energy, water, and trace-gas exchanges. Changes in spring greenup (SG) have been documented in the past half-century in response to ongoing climate change. We use normalized difference vegetation index generated from NOAA's advanced very high resolution radiometer data in the Global Inventory Modeling and Monitoring Study project over the 1982–2005 period, coupled with climate reanalysis (Climate Research Unit-National Centers for Environmental Prediction) to investigate the SG responses to preseason climate change in northern temperate and boreal regions. We compared these observed responses to the simulated SG responses to preseason climate inferred from the earth system models (ESMs) participating in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) over 1982–2005. The observationally inferred SG suggests that there has been an advance of about 1 days per decade between 1982 and 2005 in the northern midlatitude to high latitude, with significant spatial heterogeneity. The spatial heterogeneity of the SG advance results from heterogeneity in the change of the preseason climate as well as varied vegetation responses to the preseason climate across biomes. The SG to preseason temperature sensitivity is highest in forests other than deciduous needleleaf forests, followed by temperate grasslands and woody savannas. The SG in deciduous needleleaf forests, open shrublands, and tundra is relatively insensitive to preseason temperature. Although the extent of regions where the SG is sensitive to preseason precipitation is smaller than the extent of regions where the SG is sensitive to preseason temperature, the biomes that are more sensitive to temperature are also more sensitive to precipitation, suggesting the interactive control of temperature and precipitation. In the mean, the CMIP5 ESMs reproduced the dominant latitudinal preseason climate trends and SG advances. However, large biases in individual ESMs for the preseason period, climate, and SG sensitivity imply needed model improvements to climate prediction and phenological process parameterizations.