More winter weather is ahead for some locations if you believe in the world’s furriest prognosticators.
Shubenacadie Sam of Nova Scotia was the first to emerge from his den early this morning to see his shadow, which, in groundhog, lore means another six weeks of winter.
Punxsutawney Phil in Pennsylvania predicts a longer winter as well.
Ontario’s Wiarton Willie provides us with a little more hope in calling for an early spring.
A Lakehead University professor throws cold water on those predictions.
Dr. Michael Rennie and his students studied the accuracy of Groundhog Day predictions.
They gathered data from North American groundhogs, spanning 33 locations and over 530 groundhog ‘observations’ spanning several decades.
In the end, they found the predictions to be correct exactly 50 per cent of the time.
“If you think about it, we celebrate Groundhog Day a full month before these animals typically emerge from hibernation, so this practice is completely disassociated from any meaningful biological response that groundhogs might otherwise have for detecting spring conditions” says Rennie.
Some groundhogs did do better than others.
Essex Ed in Connecticut, Stonewall Jackson from New Jersey, and Chuckles in Manchester, Connecticut were accurate about 70 per cent of the time.
Supplied photo/Lakehead University
Groundhogs in the U.S. also did better than their Canadian counterparts.
Rennie says one of the surprising result was that of Punxsutawney Phil
“In the later part of his over 100-year dataset of predictions, Phil tends to have a statistically significant propensity to predict early springs in the most recent years. Maybe he’s trying to get through to the folks who don’t seem to want to listen to climate scientists.”
