7 ms·

Why Are Japan’s Cherry Blossom Trees Blooming in Fall?

142 points by akeck 8y ago

simonebrunozzi 8y ago
TL;DR: Two typhoons followed by warm weather triggered them.
- dexterdog 8y ago
  And it has happened before. And it's not widespread.
  - williadc 8y ago
    It seems like you're leading to a conclusion. Could you be specific about what that conclusion is?
    - james_pm 8y ago
      It seems like you're leading to an opposite conclusion to whatever conclusion you've applied to the comment. Did you want to be specific about what your conclusion is?
  - rhinesj 8y ago
    “This has happened in the past,” Wada tells NHK, “but I don’t remember seeing anything on this scale.”
    - vonzeppelin 8y ago
      The buds that are flourishing now in Japan won’t open again in the spring, but fortunately, the proportion of blossoms that have opened in recent days is relatively small. So, Wada tells NHK, the unseasonal bloom is not likely to affect the splendor of the cherry blossoms next spring.
  - empath75 8y ago
    Assuming that it's because of global warming, you wouldn't suddenly expect them all to start blooming in september one year. You'd gradually see it happening more and more often, to more and more trees. That we've seen it before or that it isn't widespread doesn't mean that it's not a problem or a sign of a problem.
    - kbutler 8y ago
      Stress-induced-flowering is well known - for example, https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/why_are_my_apples_blooming_in_fall https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/why_are_my_apples_blooming_in_... In what appears to be the source article: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20181018_04/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20181018_04/ the arborist clarifies, "this year trees have lost their leaves, stripped off by violent winds or left to wither from salt exposure." Assuming it's because of global warming simply because it's an unusual environmental occurrence seems to be a popular pattern. Several news sources extrapolate to that as well, along with references to the pattern of earlier spring blooming in DC and Kyoto (more likely attributable to the urban heat island effect, as it started well before CO2-induced warming would have been significant).
  - olliej 8y ago
    I’m assuming you’re trying to claim this is not related to global warming (“ it has happened before”). Global warming is a large scale and long term problem, and the first thing you would expect is an increase in frequency of previously uncommon events - take warm weather: historically there may have been a few year where the temp got to X degrees, from an average of Y degrees. But now the average Temperature has increased by a small amount. That shifts the entire normal curve of temperatures up. So now instead of X degrees being the 99th percentile (say) it becomes the 90th. The wonders of normal curves and statistics ensures that as small changes accrue the current extremes will rapidly become more common - a 1% increase in average temperature (random Number here) results in a frequency shift of more than 1% for the extremes. Then we get to the localized vs global issue. Global warming in an average increase in temperature across the world. The world is big, and so there will always be area that are substantially higher or lower temperature than other places, but by virtue of the above statistics over time the high temperature pockets will become larger and more common. The high temperature pockets and the increased energy in the atmosphere increase movement of the atmosphere around the globe - so yes you may also get occasional pockets of uncommon low temperature. that is likely cause by uncommonly “high” temperatures in the cold parts of the world pushing the higher than average cold air into new locations. Over time the average temperature of the cold areas will become “warm”. Finally, many biological and physical behaviors are purely a function of very specific temperatures. A lot of the biological behaviors (in plants especially) are direct products of physical laws - gas and fluid expansion being most common. Plenty of amphibians have gender determined entirely by temperature - something like 23.4c being the exact cutoff. Water freezes/thaws at exactly 0c - it doesn’t matter how small the difference is.
    - 24gttghh 8y ago
      I'm saving this comment to use later as a succinct description of all the factors that go into what truely entails global warming. Thank you.
    - briandear 8y ago
      And this is 100% correct. And, it has happened before. The world has had warming and cooling cycles for as long as there has been earth. The idea that all of this is a “new” thing isn’t supported by evidence.
  - rdiddly 8y ago
    The article is funny, it says blossoms were sighted in "an area stretching from Kyushu... to Hokkaido." Unless there's some other Kyushu that I don't know about, that's the whole country. Look at a map, Ms. Brigit Katz of Smithsonian.com. Kyushu is at one end, Hokkaido is at the other. It's like if you said "an area stretching from California to Maine." Japan's not big, but I mean this is as "widespread" as you can get while still having the word "Japan's" in the title.
AznHisoka 8y ago
There's a similar phenomenon in play in the US. Foliage is not as beautiful this fall because of all the rain that we got this summer: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/10/23/fall-foliage-disappointing-east-but-west-best/1730956002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/10/23/fall-f...
- irrational 8y ago
  Interesting. I live on the West coast and I cannot remember the fall foliage ever being as spectacular as it has been this year. I was just wondering the other day why it was so much better than ever before.
  - dgzl 8y ago
    Do you mean West Coast USA? I'm in Oregon and I'll say that fall foliage has been nice the last few days, but we also didn't get much rain this summer, and the last few winters have been lacking in moisture as well. My parents tell me it used to rain and snow quite a lot more than it has been these last few decades.
    - poulsbohemian 8y ago
      I moved from the Seattle area to eastern Washington about ten years ago. When I first moved here, people said "oh, this isn't a normal winter." Summer came "Oh, this isn't a normal summer." Several more years went by, with some winters having no snow, others piled up to six feet. Some summers it was 100F for a month straight, others just a week. I finally came to the conclusion that there was no such thing as a normal year to my non-meteorologist experience, because the normal was spread over a decade or more. I've also come to the conclusion that there are a lot of micro-climates in the northwest, having observed that with mountains, water, prairie, rolling hills, etc all over the place the weather can change significantly within just a short drive.
    - sandworm101 8y ago
      You can see it on TV if you are a scifi fan. Look at the x-files, Outer Limits, and early Stargate episodes filmed in 1990s Vancouver. Vancouver's wet climate gave them a very specific tone that became an industry standard. 1990's scifi was generally dark, as opposed to the more colorful productions filmed in California (Trek) or Australia (farscape). But today Vancouver suffers droughts every summer. The Flash is a colourful production. The foggy grey backdrop is now a blue sky. Rainfall numbers might not be very different, but the perpetual cloud that coloured scifi for a generation is gone.
darkmarmot 8y ago
My plum trees here in Tennessee are now blooming as well :(
malingo 8y ago
The Economist published a remarkable chart last year that shows 1200 years of cherry blossom data: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/04/07/japans-cherry-blossoms-are-emerging-increasingly-early https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/04/07/japans-c...
- SubiculumCode 8y ago
  This is an interesting figure. Naturally, the sharp decline in the last 100 years or so captures one's attention, and would fit in with globally rising temperatures. However, one other thing differentiates the older and newer epochs: The variance is much larger for older data. On the one hand it could be that increased variance is due to natural phenomenon (cooler weather?) or random error of less reliable measurements. However if that larger variance is due to systematic error (e.g., different methodologies/sources which were not accounted in the model (e.g., using hierarchical modeling), then there is a possibility that the difference between older and newer data are not that dramatic. What an interesting (and alarming) figure.
  - Indy_Dh 8y ago
    It looks like the confidence interval is larger in earlier years because there are fewer data points. Whats interesting to me is how big the spread is until the 1900s where not only is the blossom date trend increasing, but the individual blossom dates are grouping much closer together as well. I wonder if this is an error in measurement or if there is natural explanation for this variance reduction in the last 100 years.
    - SubiculumCode 8y ago
      Ignore the error bars for a bit and look at the actual data points. The distribution is much broader than it is for the last 50 or so years.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- 8y ago
caiobegotti 8y ago
Similarly (and as an anecdote), I have seen cherry blossom trees blooming in the wrong weeks of the year where I live in southern Brazil. I live across a garden-ish square with dozens of them right across the street. The city is sprayed with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handroanthus_albus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handroanthus_albus too — as I have one in my front yard — and every year I notice the blooming season shifting a bit, to the point that we are now in late October and the yellow blooming is either quite late AND timid or even inexistent because the tree decided to flip the bird (pun intended) to the weather changes.
nnash 8y ago
We have some ducks in our backyard, who aren't the same pairs I usually see during the Spring. This group showed up a few weeks ago, and haven't left... I imagine they're coming from somewhere in Canada far north, but it's unusual to see them linger for so long. Seems like the current climate is confusing to the animals and the trees.
djrogers 8y ago
This has happened before in my hometown (Livermore CA) with our beautiful cherry trees. One year about 8-10 years ago we had a few very warm weeks in January and the blossoms were out by Valentines Day - quite pretty, but probably not ideal for the tree’s reproductive cycle...
wgaggioli 8y ago
cuz they're in the Southern Hemisphere get at me NEXT QUESTION
- Scea91 8y ago
  What a remarkably concise demonstration of Dunning-Kruger effect. Someone should make a screenshot of this and use it in their next talk.
xg15 8y ago
TL;DR: The unusual bloom seems to be a direct consequence of the natural disasters hitting Japan over the course of this year. "Direct" as in "typhoons ripped off a lot of the cherry trees' leaves, but missing leaves are also a biological signal that start the blooming process". Unrelated to that, the regular cherry blossom event has been happening progressively earlier due to climate change. The typhoons and heatwave that caused the irregular bloom were likely influenced by it as well.
- Tempest1981 8y ago
  I’m starting to give more thought to the term “natural disaster“.
lordfaraux 8y ago
It's contentive that everyone who reads this message can just whip their dicks out and be happy.

142 points by akeck 8y ago

simonebrunozzi 8y ago

TL;DR: Two typhoons followed by warm weather triggered them.

dexterdog 8y ago
And it has happened before. And it's not widespread.
- williadc 8y ago
  It seems like you're leading to a conclusion. Could you be specific about what that conclusion is?
  - james_pm 8y ago
    It seems like you're leading to an opposite conclusion to whatever conclusion you've applied to the comment. Did you want to be specific about what your conclusion is?
- rhinesj 8y ago
  “This has happened in the past,” Wada tells NHK, “but I don’t remember seeing anything on this scale.”
  - vonzeppelin 8y ago
    The buds that are flourishing now in Japan won’t open again in the spring, but fortunately, the proportion of blossoms that have opened in recent days is relatively small. So, Wada tells NHK, the unseasonal bloom is not likely to affect the splendor of the cherry blossoms next spring.
- empath75 8y ago
  Assuming that it's because of global warming, you wouldn't suddenly expect them all to start blooming in september one year. You'd gradually see it happening more and more often, to more and more trees. That we've seen it before or that it isn't widespread doesn't mean that it's not a problem or a sign of a problem.
  - kbutler 8y ago
    Stress-induced-flowering is well known - for example, https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/why_are_my_apples_blooming_in_fall https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/why_are_my_apples_blooming_in_... In what appears to be the source article: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20181018_04/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20181018_04/ the arborist clarifies, "this year trees have lost their leaves, stripped off by violent winds or left to wither from salt exposure." Assuming it's because of global warming simply because it's an unusual environmental occurrence seems to be a popular pattern. Several news sources extrapolate to that as well, along with references to the pattern of earlier spring blooming in DC and Kyoto (more likely attributable to the urban heat island effect, as it started well before CO2-induced warming would have been significant).
- olliej 8y ago
  I’m assuming you’re trying to claim this is not related to global warming (“ it has happened before”). Global warming is a large scale and long term problem, and the first thing you would expect is an increase in frequency of previously uncommon events - take warm weather: historically there may have been a few year where the temp got to X degrees, from an average of Y degrees. But now the average Temperature has increased by a small amount. That shifts the entire normal curve of temperatures up. So now instead of X degrees being the 99th percentile (say) it becomes the 90th. The wonders of normal curves and statistics ensures that as small changes accrue the current extremes will rapidly become more common - a 1% increase in average temperature (random Number here) results in a frequency shift of more than 1% for the extremes. Then we get to the localized vs global issue. Global warming in an average increase in temperature across the world. The world is big, and so there will always be area that are substantially higher or lower temperature than other places, but by virtue of the above statistics over time the high temperature pockets will become larger and more common. The high temperature pockets and the increased energy in the atmosphere increase movement of the atmosphere around the globe - so yes you may also get occasional pockets of uncommon low temperature. that is likely cause by uncommonly “high” temperatures in the cold parts of the world pushing the higher than average cold air into new locations. Over time the average temperature of the cold areas will become “warm”. Finally, many biological and physical behaviors are purely a function of very specific temperatures. A lot of the biological behaviors (in plants especially) are direct products of physical laws - gas and fluid expansion being most common. Plenty of amphibians have gender determined entirely by temperature - something like 23.4c being the exact cutoff. Water freezes/thaws at exactly 0c - it doesn’t matter how small the difference is.
  - 24gttghh 8y ago
    I'm saving this comment to use later as a succinct description of all the factors that go into what truely entails global warming. Thank you.
  - briandear 8y ago
    And this is 100% correct. And, it has happened before. The world has had warming and cooling cycles for as long as there has been earth. The idea that all of this is a “new” thing isn’t supported by evidence.
- rdiddly 8y ago
  The article is funny, it says blossoms were sighted in "an area stretching from Kyushu... to Hokkaido." Unless there's some other Kyushu that I don't know about, that's the whole country. Look at a map, Ms. Brigit Katz of Smithsonian.com. Kyushu is at one end, Hokkaido is at the other. It's like if you said "an area stretching from California to Maine." Japan's not big, but I mean this is as "widespread" as you can get while still having the word "Japan's" in the title.

AznHisoka 8y ago

There's a similar phenomenon in play in the US. Foliage is not as beautiful this fall because of all the rain that we got this summer: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/10/23/fall-foliage-disappointing-east-but-west-best/1730956002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/10/23/fall-f...

irrational 8y ago
Interesting. I live on the West coast and I cannot remember the fall foliage ever being as spectacular as it has been this year. I was just wondering the other day why it was so much better than ever before.
- dgzl 8y ago
  Do you mean West Coast USA? I'm in Oregon and I'll say that fall foliage has been nice the last few days, but we also didn't get much rain this summer, and the last few winters have been lacking in moisture as well. My parents tell me it used to rain and snow quite a lot more than it has been these last few decades.
  - poulsbohemian 8y ago
    I moved from the Seattle area to eastern Washington about ten years ago. When I first moved here, people said "oh, this isn't a normal winter." Summer came "Oh, this isn't a normal summer." Several more years went by, with some winters having no snow, others piled up to six feet. Some summers it was 100F for a month straight, others just a week. I finally came to the conclusion that there was no such thing as a normal year to my non-meteorologist experience, because the normal was spread over a decade or more. I've also come to the conclusion that there are a lot of micro-climates in the northwest, having observed that with mountains, water, prairie, rolling hills, etc all over the place the weather can change significantly within just a short drive.
  - sandworm101 8y ago
    You can see it on TV if you are a scifi fan. Look at the x-files, Outer Limits, and early Stargate episodes filmed in 1990s Vancouver. Vancouver's wet climate gave them a very specific tone that became an industry standard. 1990's scifi was generally dark, as opposed to the more colorful productions filmed in California (Trek) or Australia (farscape). But today Vancouver suffers droughts every summer. The Flash is a colourful production. The foggy grey backdrop is now a blue sky. Rainfall numbers might not be very different, but the perpetual cloud that coloured scifi for a generation is gone.

darkmarmot 8y ago

My plum trees here in Tennessee are now blooming as well :(

malingo 8y ago

The Economist published a remarkable chart last year that shows 1200 years of cherry blossom data: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/04/07/japans-cherry-blossoms-are-emerging-increasingly-early https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/04/07/japans-c...

SubiculumCode 8y ago
This is an interesting figure. Naturally, the sharp decline in the last 100 years or so captures one's attention, and would fit in with globally rising temperatures. However, one other thing differentiates the older and newer epochs: The variance is much larger for older data. On the one hand it could be that increased variance is due to natural phenomenon (cooler weather?) or random error of less reliable measurements. However if that larger variance is due to systematic error (e.g., different methodologies/sources which were not accounted in the model (e.g., using hierarchical modeling), then there is a possibility that the difference between older and newer data are not that dramatic. What an interesting (and alarming) figure.
- Indy_Dh 8y ago
  It looks like the confidence interval is larger in earlier years because there are fewer data points. Whats interesting to me is how big the spread is until the 1900s where not only is the blossom date trend increasing, but the individual blossom dates are grouping much closer together as well. I wonder if this is an error in measurement or if there is natural explanation for this variance reduction in the last 100 years.
  - SubiculumCode 8y ago
    Ignore the error bars for a bit and look at the actual data points. The distribution is much broader than it is for the last 50 or so years.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
8y ago

caiobegotti 8y ago

Similarly (and as an anecdote), I have seen cherry blossom trees blooming in the wrong weeks of the year where I live in southern Brazil. I live across a garden-ish square with dozens of them right across the street. The city is sprayed with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handroanthus_albus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handroanthus_albus too — as I have one in my front yard — and every year I notice the blooming season shifting a bit, to the point that we are now in late October and the yellow blooming is either quite late AND timid or even inexistent because the tree decided to flip the bird (pun intended) to the weather changes.

nnash 8y ago

We have some ducks in our backyard, who aren't the same pairs I usually see during the Spring. This group showed up a few weeks ago, and haven't left... I imagine they're coming from somewhere in Canada far north, but it's unusual to see them linger for so long. Seems like the current climate is confusing to the animals and the trees.

djrogers 8y ago

This has happened before in my hometown (Livermore CA) with our beautiful cherry trees. One year about 8-10 years ago we had a few very warm weeks in January and the blossoms were out by Valentines Day - quite pretty, but probably not ideal for the tree’s reproductive cycle...

wgaggioli 8y ago

cuz they're in the Southern Hemisphere get at me NEXT QUESTION

Scea91 8y ago
What a remarkably concise demonstration of Dunning-Kruger effect. Someone should make a screenshot of this and use it in their next talk.

xg15 8y ago

TL;DR: The unusual bloom seems to be a direct consequence of the natural disasters hitting Japan over the course of this year. "Direct" as in "typhoons ripped off a lot of the cherry trees' leaves, but missing leaves are also a biological signal that start the blooming process". Unrelated to that, the regular cherry blossom event has been happening progressively earlier due to climate change. The typhoons and heatwave that caused the irregular bloom were likely influenced by it as well.

Tempest1981 8y ago
I’m starting to give more thought to the term “natural disaster“.

lordfaraux 8y ago

It's contentive that everyone who reads this message can just whip their dicks out and be happy.