Weather Whys; Almanacs

This is Weatherwise. All monarchs of various kinds have been around since the invention of printing, and most of them have claimed to provide accurate daily weather forecasts for well over a year in advance. They often attribute their forecasts to some special technique or formula devised by a founder many years ago, and even though no allowances are apparently made in those schemes for new discoveries and knowledge about the way the atmosphere works, quite a few people still plant, so, and swear by the old-style prognostications of their favorite almanac. But predictions generally fail the tests of time and modern meteorology. Scientists have conducted numerous studies on the validity of almanac forecasts and have found them to be largely without scientific basis. True, the predictions may be partly based on the normal or average weather conditions in a given region for any particular time of year, and in a sense there's some value to that kind of information. For instance, many areas of the country experience a phenomenon known as the January

Thaw, a period of abnormally warm temperatures in mid-delay January. While that phenomenon isn't well understood, it's helpful for people to know the time when it most frequently occurs. Overall, however, almanac forecasts won't help much. In fact, if you consult several almanacs to see their forecasts for a specific day in your region, you might well get entirely different outlooks from all of them, even though one may hit the forecast pretty close. But given the random nature of their hits and misses, almanac forecasts aren't something most people want to count on. We'd like to know what you think of Weatherwise. Please write us at Weatherwise, KGOU Radio, the University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma 73019-0250. Weatherwise is made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation. For Weatherwise, I'm Drew Barlow.