NOAA Challenges Groundhog
Feb. 1 -- Punxsutawney Phil is a little offended.
Or so says the scribe of the most famous brown, furry and burrowing meteorologist. This season scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration decided to put the groundhog to the test and checked his Groundhog Day predictions against actual NOAA records of spring's arrival.
The findings, according to Tom Ross of NOAA's Climate Monitoring Branch, show Phil the groundhog has "no predictive skill during the most recent years of this analysis."
Phil begs to differ.
"Those meteorologists are just jealous," says Bill Anderson, Phil's scribe and author of the book, Groundhog Day: 1886 to 1992. "They just don't get the same recognition that Phil does. Obviously, he's the weather king."
Watching at Cold Dawn
On Friday the town of Punxsutawney, Pa., will continue its early morning tradition and yank Phil from his heated imitation tree trunk at the crack of dawn. As the 114-year tradition dictates, if Phil sees his shadow, he'll regard it as an omen of six more weeks of cold to come and will return to his burrow. If the skies are cloudy and cast no shadow, he'll hang around, expecting an early spring.
It may be impossible to predict Phil's disposition Friday morning, but weather forecasts for Punxsutawney suggest there's a good chance he may linger outside his trunk. Cloudy skies and even snow are predicted for Friday in the small town, reducing the chance that anyone will see their shadows.
But Ross isn't convinced that seeing shadows is so significant anyway. He points out it's likely to be so unpleasant and cold at 7:25 a.m. in Punxsutawney, that Phil may decide to return to his burrow no matter what he sees.
"It can get quite cold on a February morning in Pennsylvania," Ross says.
And, Ross points out, looking for a shadow hasn't seemed to help the groundhog's record. After analyzing NOAA weather data since 1988, Ross found absolutely no correlation between Phil's predictions and the average temperatures of the next two months.
