Signs of Spring - TOO SOON?

March 24, 2017 7:53 PM

The Seasons Aren't What They Used to Be "In the latter half of the 20th century, the spring emergence of leaves, frogs, birds and flowers advanced in the Northern Hemisphere by 2.8 days per decade. I’m nearly 50, so springtime has moved, on average, a full two weeks since I was born."

National Phenology Network: Status of Spring
NYT time-lapse visualization
DC's Cherry Blossom Festival falling much earlier
Guardian, Spring Coming Earlier in US Because of Climate Change
USGS finds that “climate change is variably advancing the onset of spring across the United States." USGS Bird Phenology Project and how to participate in citizen science project tracking seasonal change
NOAA: Changes in plant hardiness zones

posted by Miko (30 comments total)

We had one of our coldest days of our entire winter in the first week of spring (it almost hit freezing at one point; the actual winter was mostly spring or autumn like), and basically, we're just randomly seeing cold and hot throughout the year now, sort of randomly, in Tallahassee, Florida. It's been messing with my internal sense of the rhythm of things big time.
posted by saulgoodman at 8:55 PM on March 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

April is still the cruelest month.
posted by tully_monster at 9:07 PM on March 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

I have hay fever, milder than my childhood version, but still an issue every spring. Back in the 1970s it started in April and hit hardest in May. Now it's usually at its worst in March.
I know allergies change over time, but this is something I have really noticed over the last decade or so.
posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 9:09 PM on March 24, 2017 [6 favorites]

The Arctic is missing ice three times the size of California this year
posted by kliuless at 9:11 PM on March 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

On the South Coast of British Columbia (aka "PNW" for Americans), it's been a cold, snowy winter. It's still relatively chilly here. This is because the northern jet stream is all screwed up. The warmer polar temperatures have pushed the jet stream into an almost north-south flow, which has brought chilly temperatures here, even as the east coast of the continent has been warm.

So spring is two weeks *late* here.
posted by My Dad at 9:49 PM on March 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

I took this picture 2 weeks ago—daffodils in full bloom in early March (zone 5), drooping under the weight of the previous night's snowfall.
posted by she's not there at 10:26 PM on March 24, 2017 [4 favorites]

One of the ways you can tell US Republicans who don't actually know any farmers or anything about ag policy, despite waxing rhapsodic about family farms and farmers and shit like that, is that I don't know ANY farmer who doesn't "believe in" global warming and who hasn't for at least a decade. Because it is wildly obvious if your livelihood depends on growing plants how much earlier spring is coming and how the rainfall patterns are changing and how much hotter the summers are getting, in my part of the world. (Also, how many more hailstorms we get because of the changes in thunderstorm patterns and I guess increasing weather intensity? But, dude, a lot of hail.)

We're gardeners; over the past ten years we've been in a spot where Zone 5 has officially become Zone 6. It is upsetting and (as someone who has spent basically my entire life within 150 miles of where I live now) profoundly confusing to see stuff coming up at the wrong times and plants that have never been here before now here, and plants that used to be here gone. And my apple trees are reluctant to set fruit because they're not getting enough cold hours. (And my daffodils keep coming up way too early and then getting flattened by surprise hailstorms that are now alarmingly frequent at strange times of year! ... on preview, yes, just like she's not there's picture this year!)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 10:27 PM on March 24, 2017 [37 favorites]

HAIL! Yes, hail! I live in Northern California, and we had hail a few weeks ago. And thunder, with the hail storm. Neither of those things is anything close to normal for Northern California in general, let alone in March, when we're already usually well on our way to spring.
posted by lazuli at 10:48 PM on March 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

I'm 62. 6.2 x 2.8 = 17.36 days of more springtime per year in my lifetime.

Born/raised in the Chicago area, endured those absolutely brutal winters in the mid to late 70s, happened to be in town on the coldest day in Chicago area history, in 1985, something like -26 F. As bad or worse than the cold and snow was that it just wouldn't relent, even springtime was gray and drear and cold and wet.

I now live in Austin. We don't even have winter, pretty much just slap autumn and spring together, it's like we cut the heart out of a Chicago area winter and chunk it into the garbage, where it belongs. I ride my bicycle every day, only on maybe four days this year was it cold enough to be considered a suffering. (I think the coldest day was 24 F, plus a high wind, cuts like a razor.) But having lived up north, I know that it's really just pretend suffering, compared.

We're about six weeks out from all the baby cardinals leaving the nest. I *love* this, cardinals are my favorite birds, and for a few weeks they're everywhere along the trail I ride.
posted by dancestoblue at 11:31 PM on March 24, 2017 [5 favorites]

I've read that climate scientists are turning to amateur gardeners for data sometimes, because avid gardeners keep notebooks - sometimes for decades. And that's decades of raw botanic and weather data.

I've noticed a change even just in ten years. Brooklyn's botanic garden has a big festival for its cherry blossoms each year, but it's not an annually fixed date - they try to time it around the time of peak bloom for their cherry collection. When I first got here it usually was the first week in May on average - but now it's almost always the last weekend in April.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:41 AM on March 25, 2017 [2 favorites]

I am an (extremely) amateur gardener in the midwest and this season has been unbelievable. When we were seeing temps in the high seventies in mid-to-late February I decided to go ahead and put in my spring crops like lettuce and beets and carrots and peas, fearing it would get too hot for them if I delayed.

A month later we've had temperatures ranging from 25 to 85, multiple tornado warnings and a bout of cherry-tomato sized hail. We built a cold frame with plastic when the temps dropped below freezing and somehow my lettuce and peas survived. Nail biter though.

Interestingly, the fucked-up-ness of the seasons is also increasingly being revealed by Facebook's "On this day" feature. Because pictures of February and March snow days keep popping up while we've got seventy degrees and yards in bloom outside.
posted by the turtle's teeth at 4:55 AM on March 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

Spring came about 20 days early in the Eastern and Midwestern United States, according to the government’s National Phenology Network

Only if you don't count Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, and that general area as "Eastern", which I wouldn't be too surprised if you don't, being familiar for example with what people from Toronto call "Northern", but you see that big horizontal line on the NPN map which extends only as far north as NYC. North of that line we're still waiting on spring. A few hundred miles north of it in Canada, there's still a meter of snow on the ground with another 6 inches arriving yesterday. Normally it's at least started to melt by this time of year. There was a false spring in February, but it didn't last long. Saying that spring came early in eastern America is missing half the local weather story, the cold half.
posted by sfenders at 4:59 AM on March 25, 2017 [4 favorites]

"I've read that climate scientists are turning to amateur gardeners for data sometimes, because avid gardeners keep notebooks - sometimes for decades"

Zooniverse, the citizen science website where regular people help sift large data sets, has had a couple of projects along these lines, typically where you look at pages from old notebooks and transcribe date/place/weather/plant data. Right now there's one with historic whaling ship logs, since captains keep weather data quite reliably and whaling ships cover most of the industrial period. If you can decipher old-timey handwriting it's pretty interesting to work your way down the log pages.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:05 AM on March 25, 2017 [4 favorites]

I don't know any nice statistics or dates, but: Australia too.
posted by Peter B-S at 5:07 AM on March 25, 2017

I agree with sfenders, above: here in Rhode Island, March had the lowest average
Monthly temperature of the whole winter!

I saw a crocus do the whole "come up and then get clobbered by snow" a good three weeks ago -- way too early!!
posted by wenestvedt at 6:14 AM on March 25, 2017 [2 favorites]

Interestingly, the fucked-up-ness of the seasons is also increasingly being revealed by Facebook's "On this day" feature. Because pictures of February and March snow days keep popping up while we've got seventy degrees and yards in bloom outside.

Yes, exactly this, bringing home the disparities in a hyper-personal and local way.
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:20 AM on March 25, 2017

Here in Indiana, my lillies started coming up over three weeks ago. The lilacs started budding. There were several nights throughout winter where we were able to sleep with the windows open! And, it's in the 70's today.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:06 AM on March 25, 2017

Central New York here. We had flowers in February (only very early things, like hazel—no dandelions or cherries or serviceberries yet), which were destroyed by frost a few weeks ago and then three feet of snow last week for good measure. I'm curious to see how the false spring affects the fruit tree crop. (Pomes and stone fruits are a big part of the economy here, being farm country.)

A good place to track the temperature changes for your area is Berkeley Earth's Location Database. In my particular location, the average temperature has gone up about 1.5°C in the last 150 years. The rate of change is increasing, too. I've been wondering if I should start moving even further north.
posted by ragtag at 7:52 AM on March 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

We just had a stretch of nine days over ninety degrees here in Tucson.

Our usual first day at 90 degrees is in early April.
posted by MrVisible at 8:25 AM on March 25, 2017

I just caught myself clicking refresh on the Spring Leaf Index Anomaly map to see if spring got any closer since four hours ago.
posted by sfenders at 9:06 AM on March 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

Saying that spring came early in eastern America is missing half the local weather story, the cold half.

Well, I'd say "east" and "Northeast" refer to somewhat different regions, but the Northeast has not been immune to noticeable climate swings. Ticks are more prevalent because the subfreezing part of the year that limits their reproduction is shorter. The zone hardiness map has changed quite a bit in Northern New England, even over the years I lived there, from 2004-2016. Ski season is shortening.

And snow falling or on the ground, and cold temps now and then, aren't the only hallmarks of winter. It's all about averages. The average winter temperatures in New England continue to climb - and yes, to go back and forth in wild swings - to the point where maple sugaring season has had to follow suit and shift noticeably. For instance, in Maine:

At an association meeting last week, about half of the members said they already started tapping and making syrup, while the other half planned to begin soon, St. Saviour said. Traditionally, producers didn’t start boiling syrup until March, but in recent years early thaws have created ideal conditions for a sap run in January and February. Last year, producers in southern Maine were tapping in January, the earliest many could remember doing so.

and

maple syrup expert Kathy Hopkins with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension: “These days, with the weather so capricious, the maple season can begin anytime between January and late March,” she said. “It’s good for producers to be aware. To be ready. To have all of their equipment ready to go, and then you can pounce as soon as the weather is right, no matter what the calendar says".... There already have been some good sap runs in the southern part of Maine in the third week in January, she said. Producers who were ready already have made some syrup. “It’s early,” Hopkins said. “The thing about it is that if you go back in time, back through 100 years of records, you will find early seasons and you will find late seasons. I would guess that it seems like there are more early seasons now than there used to be.”

Early warm spells can harm syrup flavor, too - trees make sugar essentially as antifreeze, and they need a long spell of subfreezing weather to make enough of it to create flavorful sap. There is a lot of study about this going on in the region's agricultural research stations.
posted by Miko at 9:11 AM on March 25, 2017 [3 favorites]

Further north I'd say the ski season has been getting shorter too, but mostly the problem has been at the other end, with significant snow cover often happening later than used to be normal. There have been unusually many and severe warm spells in the middle of winter, but then an actual spring has been late in arriving (iirc) three years out of the past four. So yeah, very strange and unpredictable overall.
posted by sfenders at 9:29 AM on March 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

Brooklyn's botanic garden has a big festival for its cherry blossoms each year, but it's not an annually fixed date - they try to time it around the time of peak bloom for their cherry collection. When I first got here it usually was the first week in May on average - but now it's almost always the last weekend in April.

This has become a problem in much of Japan. The new school year is supposed to coincide with cherry blossom time in the first week of April. Now the cherry trees bloom in March. It's very odd.
posted by My Dad at 9:33 AM on March 25, 2017

even as the east coast of the continent has been warm

I don't know what you'd class as 'warm', but here in Manhattan it has been "-7C feels like -12C" a number of times over the past few weeks. But I'm not a native New Yorker so I'm not really sure what passes for a normal winter (just that it is a *lot* colder than I'm used to in London)

I don't know ANY farmer who doesn't "believe in" global warming

To say you don't believe in global warming is just plain dumb. It is slightly less dumb to say that you don't believe it is caused by human activity (but not much, IMHO)

Chicago... even springtime was gray and drear and cold and wet.

As a Londoner, I would immediately feel at home.
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 3:56 PM on March 25, 2017

Chicago... even springtime was gray and drear and cold and wet.

As a Londoner, I would immediately feel at home.

Yes, but Londoners are allowed to complain about their weather. When I was living in Chicago, I was informed in no uncertain terms that only "weather wimps" dared to grumble when there were wind chills of -50F* or something equally ferocious. Real Chicagoans donned shorts and went running as soon as the sun came out, even if it was only 20F**. As I'm from Southern California, I found these strictures on my all-too-natural expressions of displeasure to be...aggravating.


*--I became accustomed to going out in all temperatures, because, you know, the winter wasn't going anywhere, but that was the day I went outside without checking the weather report first, said "...wait, this doesn't feel right at all," went back in, found out about the flash freeze warning, and decided my trip to the Regenstein could wait.

**--Seriously. There is no doubt a sociological study to be written about this phenomenon.
posted by thomas j wise at 4:17 PM on March 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

The NY area, where I live now, is having a much milder winter than is usual.
posted by Miko at 6:34 PM on March 25, 2017

Chicago... even springtime was gray and drear and cold and wet.

As a Londoner, I would immediately feel at home.
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 5:56 PM on March 25
I've only been in London once, 3 days in late November. It was absolutely gray and drear and cold and wet. As a visitor, wanted to see lots of things, and I did see lots of things, but one thing I did not see was the sun. Everybody seemed rather cheerful though, a somewhat red-cheeked, cold, cheerfulness -- really nice people.
posted by dancestoblue at 12:42 AM on March 26, 2017

I read about a study (no link, sorry) that found this kind of discussion -- "the weather sure sure is different to how it used to be" -- is more effective at getting many people to believe in and/or care about climate change than "we're ruining things for our children and grandchildren". Which is kind of depressing in a way, but whatever argument works, I guess.
posted by nnethercote at 1:15 AM on March 26, 2017

When I was living in Chicago, I was informed in no uncertain terms that only "weather wimps" dared to grumble when there were wind chills of -50F* or something equally ferocious. Real Chicagoans donned shorts and went running as soon as the sun came out, even if it was only 20F**.

hmm. My experience as an immigrant from warm places in Chicago is that everyone complains about the weather hundreds of times per day, and they wear absurdly thick jackets and squat in their over-heated indoor (and public transit) saunas all winter. And there are no coat racks 'cause these tropical nutters think wearing parkas in 80 F rooms is normal. Telling people that I like snow seems to be a bigger social faux pas than telling them I think their god is an absurd fiction.

Perhaps we've been hanging out in different neighborhoods, or perhaps they don't make Chicagoans like they used to. . . but having the bike paths all to myself is pretty nice. Except this year, when we seem to have skipped winter entirely.
posted by eotvos at 6:40 AM on March 26, 2017

Like Prince said, "Sometimes It Snows In April"... And he was from Minneapolis
posted by Stu-Pendous at 5:46 PM on March 26, 2017