If you are surprised by this year’s on again, off again winter then you probably didn’t pick up a 2019 copy of the Old Farmer’s Almanac, which predicted a regular winter on the “warm and wet” side in New England.
“It’s a classic El Nino winter, which I hate,” said Old Farmer’s Almanac fact checker, resident folklore expert and doggerel writer Tim Clark. “All the snow storms turn to rain and ice and yuck. And nobody’s ever figured out a sport you do with slush.”
While right on, this prediction is in contrast to the Old Farmer’s Almanac’s competition The Farmer’s Almanac, which predicted a long, very cold, snow-filled winter.
“They use the solar cycle, but I don’t know what their formula is,” Clark said.
While Clark can’t speak to how the competition works out its prediction, he can say the Old Farmer’s Almanac uses a mix of old and new weather prediction techniques honed over its 227 years of publishing.
“We don’t predict the future. We predict the past,” Clark said.
The Old Farmer’s Almanac long range weather forecasts are based on three scientific disciplines: solar science, the study of sunspots and other solar activity, climatology, the study of prevailing weather patterns and meteorology, the study of the atmosphere.
“Right back to the beginning, the key has been the solar cycle,” Clark said. “And that is best observed to the number of sunspots. The cycle is the rise and fall of the amount of radiant energy that the sun produces and goes along with the number of sunspots. Generally speaking the more spots, the higher amount of energy.”
Based solely on the solar cycle, it should be a cold, cold winter, Clark admits.
“We happen to be right now in one of the lowest periods in 100 years. Very little activity on the sun surface. So according to the theory we should be experiencing much colder weather,” Clark said. “Are we experiencing record cold winters? No, we are experiencing record warm winters. And this gets us reluctantly involved with the arguments of climate change.”
To make its long term forecast, the Old Farmer’s Almanac also relies on what is thought of as modern weather knowledge, such as whether it is an El Nina year or an El Nino year and asking ocean scientists the temperatures of the ocean.
“So we blend this historical baseline that we have of the solar cycle with much more contemporary measurements of the ocean currents, the ocean temperatures, the ocean jet stream – and weird things have been going on with the jet stream,” Clark said.
The Old Farmer’s Almanac, published every September, was founded in 1792 by Robert B. Thomas and has the distinction of being the oldest continuously published periodical in North America, published by Yankee Publishing in Dublin since 1939.
“We know the founder, Robert B. Thomas, knew about the solar cycle and that he used it,” Clark said. “He thought astrology was nonsense and he’s probably turning over in his grave because we do a little astrology now. We do a little astrology, not because we believe it, but because it’s definitely a part of U.S. history.”
Almanacs go back thousands of years and were deeply related to astrology, he said.
“The line between science and folklore in the Old Farmer’s Almanac has always been a fuzzy one,” Clark said, but is important to readers. “There are a lot of people that still plant by the moon. We hear from them all the time.”
The Old Farmer’s also distinguishes itself with the tag, “Useful, with a Pleasant Degree of Humor.”
While the number of farmers have decreased over the past two centuries, fewer than 2 percent of the American population are now actively involved with farming as a profession today, more than 100 million households garden, Clark said. So along with the long term weather forecast, the moon cycle and a touch of astrology, the Old Farmer’s Almanac publishes stories about gardening and beekeeping and other outdoors activities to satisfy its evolving readers.
Clark said the wisdom of the Old Farmer’s Almanac can be summed up in two words, “pay attention.”
“I love folklore and I respect it, because it’ s accumulated wisdom,” Clark said.