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The Japanese have been keeping records of when cherry trees blossom since the year 815.
(hexbear.net)
I looked for the source - I couldn't find it.
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Edit: SkingradGuard found it.
It's less than 2000 records. If they had them all in one place that's only like a few weeks of data entry at worst
If they had to go out and find multiple data points per year though...
Maybe, but something tells me they weren’t just recording cherry blossom dates. I just have a super hard time believing they didn’t record a bunch of stuff throughout the year, cherry blossom date being but one of them.
But maybe I’m wrong :)
Oh yeah, if they were entering data for tons of things each year and not just turning directly to the cherry blossom page that's a lot.
I live in Asheville and know tons of people who work at the NOAA offices here and that dataset alone is like 4 underground warehouses of weather data just from the past 200 years. Can't imagine something like that for 1200 years of records.
My job is also doing a lot of as built data entry for telecom networks though, so I'm used to hundreds of thousands of data points and that skewes my judgement.