The Old Farmer’s Almanac is predicting a snowy winter across Canada, but here in BC we could be in for a short cold season.
“I’m calling it Snowman-ia, and if you don’t like snowmen, we’ll call it Snow-mania,” says Jack Burnett, Managing Editor of the Old Farmer's Almanac. “ It’s looking snowy across the country, on all three coasts, all the provinces and territories.”
He says BC will have a typical winter season temperature-wise, as will Ontario, and parts of the Maritimes can expect above-normal temps. There are 2 specific times where Burnett is predicting cold weather and extra snow for the Okanagan: End of December/beginning of January & the last half of February. “What’s interesting about that is that we don’t really see any cold or snow in March or April,” Burnett told The Early Edition on AM 1150.
The Old Farmer’s Almanac has been forecasting for over 200 years and Burnett says their accuracy remains at about 80%.
“We use the same formula that we used in 1792. We use 3 things. Meteorology which of course is local air masses, things like that, that affect your part of the world. Climatology which is long term weather trends in an area. Third, is the solar science, or radiation,” said Burnett.
“The guy who created the Old Farmer’s Almanac outside Boston in 1792, certainly didn’t discover sunspots or any such thing, but he was one of the first weather prognosticators to think that solar radiation might have something to do with it. We still have the formula/the recipe, physically, but it’s long since been turned into computer algorithms.”