With the end of the official winter season, now is a good time to compare the winter outlooks for the Farmers’ Almanac and NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center. A quick look shows that the CPC did a much better job of depicting our wet and warm winter than either of the almanacs did. We don’t know how the almanacs make their forecasts but the CPC forecast was dominated by a combination of the strong El Nino influence and the long-term rise in temperatures, and this year it worked very well. You can read a discussion at https://www.iweathernet.com/educational/weather-myths/farmers-almanac-vs-meteorologists and see these maps comparing observations, CPC forecast, and the forecast from the Farmers’ Almanac. The winter forecast for the Old Farmer’s Almanac is shown below the other maps just for comparison. The almanacs did a better job with the wet conditions in the Southeast this winter than they did with temperature, though.
