BY JOHN JOHNSTON
The Cincinnati Enquirer
The 1999 edition of The Old Farmer's Almanac hits newsstands today with this winter forecast for the Ohio valley:
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ALMANAC HITS, MISSES |
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A look at how The Old Farmer's Almanac fared in forecasting some major weather events in the past year:
Weather: Hurricane Bonnie blows into the Carolinas on Aug. 26.
Almanac prediction: "A hurricane may hit coastal North Carolina in mid- to late August, but is more likely to make landfall farther north."
Weather: Heat sears Texas, with temperatures reaching triple digits most of July and early August.
Almanac prediction: "Temperatures in the summer season will be about 2 degrees hotter than normal. The worst of the heat will occur in early and mid-August, when several record highs may be shattered."
Weather: A soggy April sets a record for rainfall in Greater Cincinnati.
Almanac prediction: " . . . rainfall below normal."
Weather: A record-setting 18.5-inch snowfall blankets Cincinnati Feb. 5-6.
Almanac prediction: "February will be milder than normal, although snow in mid-month will be heavy." -- John Johnston
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"Typical, with temperatures near normal and precipitation and snowfall near or a bit below normal."
Even in this high-tech age, making long-range weather predictions is a gamble, but it's one that the almanac has been willing to take since 1792.
Now, though, the venerable publication has some competition. WeatherPlanner, a division of Wayne, Pa.-based Strategic Weather Services, is offering forecasts -- for a specific date -- up to 12 months in advance. Customers can target any of 85,000 locations in the United States, Canada and the Caribbean.
The service comes in the wake of increasing interest in weather news, from the Weather Channel's 24-hour cable presence to local TV meteorologists with Doppler-equipped studios to a proliferation of weather Web sites for anyone who just has to know right now.
But even as people soak up weather information like parched ground in a hard rain, long-range forecasting remains the province of a brave few.
The Old Farmer's Almanac features 16 regional forecasts, each with a year's worth of weather broken into spans of several days to a week or more.
Michael Steinberg, the man responsible for those forecasts the past three years, is senior vice president of AccuWeather, a State College, Pa.-based company with more than 15,000 business, industry, government and media clients, including The Cincinnati Enquirer.
"I try to combine a number of different long-range forecasting methods and develop a consensus," he said. Those include solar cycles and historical weather patterns.
WeatherPlanner, meanwhile, says it can predict more detailed weather trends with "proprietary technology" that uses "higher mathematics and atmospheric physics."
According to WeatherPlanner, Christmas Day in Cincinnati will be dry, with a high temperature in the low 30s to mid-40s; lows in the mid-20s to mid-30s.
The service, which offers a money-back guarantee, costs $14.95 for a one- to 10-day forecast via the Internet (http: - - www.weatherplanner.com). Or you can talk to a weather adviser for $2.99 a minute by calling (800) 741-7526.
As you might expect, predicting the weather for specific days so far in advance is controversial.
"I would say we run across a healthy skepticism," said Frederic D. Fox, president and chief executive officer of Strategic Weather Services.
Count Edward O'Lenic among the skeptics. He is a meteorologist with the Climate Prediction Center of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, a part of the National Weather Service. "There is zero predictability for daily weather beyond a maximum of about a week, or in some special situations, two weeks," Mr. O'Lenic said.
"The atmosphere is a chaotic fluid system, and the models we use to make forecasts for the atmosphere have tiny errors in them." The further out predictions are made, the more those errors are magnified, he said.
Three years ago, the weather service began issuing "long-lead climate outlooks," which attempt to predict whether temperatures and precipitation will be above normal, near normal, or below normal for three-month periods as far as a year in advance.
But that's a far cry from predicting whether it will rain on the Fourth of July next year.
The supposed accuracy of long-range forecasts can be misleading, experts say. As Mr. Steinberg noted, "For most places in the United States, if I tell you that every single day of the year is going to be dry, I'll be right about 70 percent of the time."
So how accurate is WeatherPlanner? Mr. Fox answers with client satisfaction ratings: 78 percent of clients have said they would use the service again; 84 percent would recommend it to friends. "That's not to say we're getting the weather right all the time for them, but we're getting it right many more times than not," he said.
WeatherPlanner markets itself as a way to plan dates for weddings, birthday parties, golf outings and the like. But Mr. Fox acknowledges that "we don't have day-to-day precision. We have a precision about a day on either side. So we can forecast intervals of warm and cold, wet and dry, within about a 24-hour window on either side of that day."
Even that raises eyebrows.
"Climatologists are having better luck projecting long-range trends," said Tim Hedrick, WKRC-TV (Channel 12) meteorologist."However, day-to-day (temperatures), cloud patterns and precipitation, long range, will always be difficult to forecast."
"People should be skeptical of any (forecast) past five days," he said. A forecast for a particular day, made months in advance, "is absurd."
But Mr. Fox is convinced that Strategic Weather Services is on to something. WeatherPlanner is an outgrowth of his company's work with corporate clients, which have increased from about 10 to 150 in three years.
Mr. Fox says his 40 meteorologists interpret weather information to help companies such as Kmart, Wal-Mart and Eastern Mountain Sports forecast demand for their weather-related products and services.
For individuals using WeatherPlanner, there is a money-back guarantee. You'll find no such guarantee in the pages of The Old Farmer's Almanac.
"I think people want us to be right," said Tim Clark, the almanac's executive editor, "and I think they want it for the wrong reasons. They think that we use folklore. They'd like to believe there's some kind of wisdom that's older and more reliable than science. "So they're always disappointed when I tell them, no, we don't use woolly bear caterpillars to predict the weather. We use science, I'm afraid."
