Chapter 1: What is the significance of the Cherry Blossom Festival?
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Emily Kwong here with someone very special to our team, shortwave intern Aru Nair. Hey, Emily. What's up? You and I are at NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C., and it's your first time living in the district.
How's it going? It is. I'm originally from Wyoming, and I moved to D.C. last fall. My favorite part has definitely been the public transit. It's very magical to me. It's a joy to ride. But there is one particular event that happens every spring that's a huge deal. Emily, have you heard of the Cherry Blossom Festival?
You can't escape it. This time of year, the cherry blossom marketing is everywhere. But originally, these blossoms came from trees gifted by Japan in 1912. And now they turn the city into this like soft pink wonderland. Yeah, there's so many trees in bloom right now.
Yeah.
So we have 20,000 trees park wide, but of the cherry trees in particular, we have right around 3,700.
So this is Matthew Morrison. He's an arborist and urban forester with the National Park Service. And he told me every single year, locals and tourists flood the National Mall for the annual Cherry Blossom Festival to view these millions of flowers.
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Chapter 2: How do scientists define peak bloom for cherry trees?
You might have observed it too.
If you go outside and you take a cherry blossom in in December, it'll take a really long time to bloom. If you go outside right now and you take a cherry blossom in, or if you went three weeks ago or four weeks ago and you brought it inside, it'll bloom right away.
You know, this kind of reminds me of baking. You know how you have to chill dough in order to bake it? The trees have to chill a little bit before they'll bloom in the heat.
Exactly. 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.
Additionally, a lot of the plants appear to need a certain number of daylight hours for that spring warming. So it's not just that it's warm, it's that they're also getting a certain amount of sunlight.
Okay, so Elizabeth is saying to bloom, there needs to be a combination of triggers. Trees need the winter cold, they need the spring warmth, and they need longer days in order to begin the blooming process. Yeah, exactly. You know, we have had a really strange winter in D.C. There's been this pendulum swing between multiple snowstorms and then warm 70, 80 degree days.
So did any of the folks who work with the trees describe how this weather is affecting the cherry blossoms?
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.
What is Mike's office's track record of accuracy for predicting peak bloom?
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Chapter 3: What are the stages of cherry tree blossoming?
They're by far, I would say, the best evidence of anthropogenic climate change shifting our springs earlier.
I didn't realize how much insight cherry blossoms provided in this way. I remember in an earlier NatureQuest episode, we talked about this, this field devoted to the timing of periodic natural events, flowers blooming, birds migrating, animals going into hibernation. It tells us something.
Across the globe, I would say whether it's grasses starting to germinate, whether it's the leaf out of beech trees, whether it's flowering on a plum tree or a cherry tree, those events have consistently shifted between two to four weeks, depending on exactly what plant you're looking at and how much that place has warmed.
Two to four weeks doesn't sound like a lot, but in the life of the environment, that is a big difference.
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.
As a gateway. Yeah. to better forecast what forest trees are doing and what every fruit tree, peaches and plums, all these things are doing the same thing as cherries. And so we started the forecasting competition to try to get people to help us understand this mystery.
That is a good way to get community scientists involved.
Make it a competition. Exactly. And they're hoping that turns into better forecasting models that scientists can use in the future.
So to bring this back home to D.C., when is peak bloom supposed to happen for us this spring?
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