Aru Nair

They need both parts.

Yeah.

And just to be clear, Emily, this winter chilling bucket is something that scientists are still studying.

They know the plants need the cold weather to bloom on time, but they're still not quite sure exactly how it works.

And Elizabeth told me there's also the factor of longer days.

Yeah, so basically this up and down weather pattern can totally shake up their predictions.

And there's a big range of possibilities.

D.C.

'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.