Aru Nair

's peak bloom has been recorded as early as March 15th and as late as April 18th.

Well, sometimes they're really accurate.

Yeah, Mike even remembers one particularly chaotic year where they announced their prediction, updated the date, and then they had to change the date back again, back to their original prediction.

Yeah, and Matthew and Mike are not the only ones focused on peak bloom and predicting peak bloom.

Elizabeth told me humans have been recording cherry blossoms around the world for hundreds of years.

which she says is really useful for scientists like her, who want to study how the timing of those natural events shifts.

Yeah, and Elizabeth and her colleagues were like, given all this data plus the reality of a warming planet, how do we make these predictions more accurate?

So they started running a competition asking people to share their predictions for cherry tree peak bloom in places in the U.S., in Japan, in Switzerland, in Canada.

Make it a competition.

Exactly.

And they're hoping that turns into better forecasting models that scientists can use in the future.

It's happening right now.

So I was thinking maybe we could go out and see them?

I enjoy the sunshine and the blossom.

We were here maybe three weeks ago, and they looked dead.

Hannah and I, we were like, are the trees alive?

I don't know.

But now it's, yeah, it makes a world of difference to see them bloom.