Kyoto’s cherry blossom peak bloom record spans 1,215 years (812-2026); the 2026 peak on March 29 is the earliest in the dataset’s history.
Key Takeaways
Dataset compiled by Yasuyuki Aono from imperial diaries, monastery records, and meteorological data; 838 observations archived at NOAA Paleoclimatology.
The 30-year rolling mean held between early and mid-April for most of the millennium, then dropped sharply after 1900.
The Little Ice Age is visible as a slow drift toward later peaks from roughly the 14th through 19th centuries.
Earliest recorded peak: March 25 (2023); latest: May 4 (1323); largest single-year swing: 27 days between 1556 and 1557.
The 2026 peak on March 29 sits more than two weeks earlier than the pre-modern average.
Hacker News Comment Review
Commenters raised confounding factors: Kyoto’s urban heat island effect and possible selective breeding of earlier-blooming cultivars may inflate the warming signal.
The source is a reformatted visualization of Aono’s existing phenological record via Our World in Data, not new research; at least one commenter flagged this directly.
Discussion is shallow overall, mostly personal bloom anecdotes from outside Kyoto rather than statistical or methodological critique.
