California's superblooms

California's superblooms are so large, they can be seen from space

Eric Brooks

California’s superbloom is out of this world.

Bursting swaths of yellow, orange and purple wildflowers have come to life on satellite and aerial images taken in recent weeks by the European Space Agency, NASA and San Francisco-based aerospace company Planet Labs. The stunning pictures from hundreds of miles above the Earth show fields upon fields of colorful superblooms across various spots in Central and Southern California following record winter precipitation.

“We are seeing a crazy amount of flowers, but not necessarily all over California,” Yoseline Angel, postdoctoral researcher at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, told SFGATE in a video call. “There are certain, specific places where you’ll be able to see these superblooms.” Those include the Antelope Valley California Poppy State Natural Reserve outside of Lancaster, Carrizo Plain National Monument west of Bakersfield and Walker Canyon at Lake Elsinore.

The last major superbloom in California happened in 2019. Smaller blooms are taking place across open spaces in the state, including some of California’s national and state parks. While sites like Joshua Tree National Park and Pinnacles National Park are seeing average blooms, other places, like Death Valley National Park, won’t see a superbloom this year — the “cookbook ingredients” just weren’t there this winter, park officials said.

“It’s like following a recipe,” Angel said. “It requires a unique combination of certain factors.” Factors including consecutive dry years preceding the blooms, wildflower species that demand a certain amount of rain, soil conditions, a rise in temperature from winter to spring, and humidity. “The heavy rain could also [deter superblooms]. If it’s too much [rain], then the seeds aren’t going to be happy with this amount of water. It has to be a specific amount of water and temperature together to get it right.”

The sites where superblooms are occurring clearly have the right factors, to the point where satellites are capturing the flowers from space. Planet Labs’ satellites operate at an altitude of more than 300 miles. In NASA’s case, the stunning imagery came from airborne equipment and high-tech cameras aboard the International Space Station.

There’s more to the images beyond showcasing how large the superblooms are this year. NASA plans to use the pictures and data collected to further study climate change, behavior of pollinators like bees, and future agriculture yields, among other items critical to the planet’s environmental health. “It’s an incredibly dense data set,” Dana Chadwick, scientist with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s water and ecosystems group, said.

“One of the nice things about using satellite data, you can get a picture of where geographically these things are happening year after year now,” Chadwick explained. “You can think about where these things are occurring or where in space they are happening. It’s important for so many reasons.”

Truly diverse in nature, superblooms involve a variety of flowers.The California poppy takes most of the headlines. But this year’s blooms include other favorites, such as owl’s clovers and cream cups in the Antelope Valley reserve, and orange fiddlenecks and goldfields at the Carrizo Plain National Monument.

“Visit soon as the region is beginning the downside of peak bloom,” the 2023 Theodore Payne Foundation Wild Flower Hotline said of the bloom at Carrizo.

The superblooms have drawn increasingly larger crowds over the years, amplified by the rise of social media and influencers. The biggest blooming events are known to sometimes bring in hundreds of thousands of visitors, even causing traffic jams in hard-to-reach places like Death Valley National Park. This year, local officials in Lake Elsinore preemptively closed trails and viewpoints in an effort to protect the flowers themselves and avoid another so-called “poppy nightmare.”

Other places have taken to zip lines as an environmentally safe way for tourists to see superblooms up close and personal.

“It’s not going to go away anytime soon because there’s this overall interest in outdoor recreation and conservation in general,” said Daniel Winkler, research ecologist for U.S. Geological Survey’s Southwest Biological Science Center in Tucson, Arizona. Winkler co-wrote a paper published in 2020 analyzing how climate extremes shape biological and cultural life with events like superblooms. “I personally love those before-and-after photos that show the dramatic change, whether it’s visible from space or its the before-and-after on the ground from the superbloom area.”

He said the rise in superbloom interest has been a boon for America’s deserts and rarely visited public lands.

“They’re actually full of life and filled with these adorable species that have evolved over millions of years, just like any other animal or plant on Earth,” Winkler said. “These deserts are valued by scientists because we get to understand the world we live in, but most of these superblooms are happening on public land. There are tons and tons of tourists going to deserts to capture them for selfies or experience them in their own unique ways.”

Even as researchers continue to study superblooms and their lasting impact on the world, scientists welcome the increased attention.

“I think one of the things that’s really nice about it is that it’s a natural thing that people get really excited about,” Chadwick said. “It’s these events that are causing people to be more aware of their environment and taking care of their environment.”