It is April 18 in Erie, PA. It sleeted yesterday at my kid's soccer game. However, I know in my heart that Spring is coming. Every year, I get excited about the first crocuses and daffodils here in NW PA.
Due to these hard winters followed by beautiful (if snowy) springs, I feel a certain kinship for the Japanese spring lovers who have been tracking the date of the cherry blossom blooms in Kyoto, Japan, for the last 1,200 years. Well, it hasn't always been tracked by humans; sometimes, modern humans have extrapolated this data. I'll get to that in a second.
I learned about this data from Twitter user Robin Rohwer. She created this visualization for the data:
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| https://twitter.com/RobinRohwer/status/1639097356657512449 |
She also shared where she found this data via NOAA, via Yasuyuki Aono's website: http://atmenv.envi.osakafu-u.ac.jp/aono/kyophenotemp4/. Go to the NOAA website and poke around. You can see notations referring to how the data was extrapolated over time and how clever researchers used other information to figure out the day the trees bloomed.
Your students can play with the original data, creating beautiful visualizations celebrating Spring. Also, this data is likely an indicator of global climate change and industrialization.
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