When will spring 🍃 come where you live? Or has it already? For my Climate Lab column, I made a tool that lets you look up any place in the contiguous U.S. and find out if leaves came earlier or later than usual. Check it out:

Check out this map. 🟩 shows where leaves came earlier than usual, and 🟪 shows where they came later. This year’s winter weather pattern cut the country in half. High pressure warmed the east, while low pressure kept conditions cooler and wetter than usual across the west.

Is earlier spring related to climate change? Yes and no. No, because in any given year, the timing of spring’s arrival has more to do with seasonal variation than global warming. Yes, because over the long term, spring's arrival tracks temperature, which is on a warming trend.

You can see how I made the map on @observablehq here: It converts in a NetCDF file the the USA National Phenology Network into an HTML Canvas. But warning, it takes some time to paint all those pixels.

The code and data to produce the chart comparing leaf timing and temperature is on @observablehq here:

That's it for Climate Lab column #3. Check out the full story here to look up where you live and find out why naturalists across the eastern U.S. are exasperated this year:

@washingtonpost Moss point, MS