Does the Farmer's Almanac winter prediction hold up in Indiana?

Intro The farmer's almanac winter outlook is ready for winter 2024 to 2025 was expecting. And what of the previous forecast turned out to be here in central Indiana? We wanted to take a closer look and do a deep dive this winter. They are expecting cold, wet and white, which typically is a winter around central Indiana. We do have cold days. We do have a lot of wet days. We do have a lot of white days too. We get some snowfall too. So this one's a little bit kind of generic for us. That's generally what we would expect. But sometimes the farmer's almanac has been a little bit more specific on and what they're expecting and they have done that in the past couple of years. So let's take a look at the past, let's say, 10 years on what they forecasted and what we've actually seen across central Indiana, we'll go, we'll start with last winter and then go back to the last 10, last winter. Last winter They called for a cold and stormy winter. If you remember, we had a very strong El Nino and we barely had any snowfall. In fact, we had about eight inches in Indianapolis officially. We should typically get about 25 inches. So we barely even got a quarter of snow. So, and there wasn't a lot of ice. It's just pretty quiet. We had some rain every once in a while. Stormy. Yeah, maybe not so much. So, we put an X there on snow. It called for a cold winter. We actually had a lot of warm weather. There were a few cold spells. Of course, it is winter. You have to have those. But overall we ran 678 degrees above average for much of the winter. So we had to put that in X two. We're not gonna go through all of these, but we are gonna go through some to kind of explain why we put X's and why we put a couple of checks. If you remember two winters ago, going right into Christmas. So two Christmases ago, they're calling for unreasonably cold and snowy. If you remember going to that Christmas, it was downright cold. In fact, we dropped down to negative nine in Indianapolis. Uh Kyle at our assignment desk, he said they got a wind chill of negative 30. So I'd say that was unreasonably cold. But when you look over the whole winter, it actually came out to be 10 degrees above average. Even when you factored in that cold spell, that winter was fairly warm. But we did have an unreasonably cold week. We went ahead and put a check there. Snowfall wise, got another quarter of what we should get. So we didn't get a lot of snow. So it wasn't snowy. Technically, we did get some snow. But if you're talking about an average Indiana winter, we haven't had some of those in the past couple of years. They have been on the money though. Sometimes, especially when we go to about 10 years ago and then another 1 2017 to 2018, they called for average snow and we got there right at average, maybe one inch below average. We count it for sure. Cold. We were right on the money there for our average temperatures. So that was a pretty good forecast. Uh, 2014 to 2015. That was the big snow that we had. Uh, we had stinging cold at times. We actually below average for the whole winter. That was a cold winter for us. Normal snowfall, we got about, uh, actually a little bit above average snowfall by about an inch or so. So we'll call that normal. But what we kind of noticed most times they just call for cold and snowy, which yes, you do get cold days and you do get snowy days. But as a whole, we've been a little bit on the warm side for Indiana and a little bit on the low side when it came to snowfall, we haven't had a lot. So overall you got to take the forecast with a grain of salt just a little bit, but there will be times where it is frozen and it is snowy or it is cold or it's even numbing cold. So now let's talk about what we're forecasting. We're not quite ready to have a full Winter outlook winter outlook for Indiana yet. Once we get into the fall, get into, let's say about late November, early December. We'll start to have a little bit more of a clear idea, kind of clear as mud, but a clear idea on what the winter could possibly be like. It is still in the middle of the summer. So take this with just a grain of salt. We're thinking that we're going to go back into a La Nina pattern. When we look at La Nina's, we've only kind of forecasted for snowfall. Got a couple of different colors here. The dark blue area shows you areas where we typically actually get more snowfall on average, not every La Nina, but many times we do, in fact, about 60% of the time we do get more snowfall, the cut off right here in central Indiana. This light blue area is really interesting. When you look at the data all together, we typically see more snowfall in the light blue area, but only a couple of times. In fact, they've got blasted with snow maybe two or three times. So when you look at all the La Nina, it kind of skews all the data. So it gets really tricky just southwest of Indianapolis, going all the way to Oklahoma City and Tulsa. So when we're looking at this area, including Southwester Indiana, we do get sometimes more snowfall. But every once in a while you see the brown areas, we don't have any of those across central Indiana. These are areas where typically we just do not get as much snow on average. So we don't have anything like that. Typically, if you want a good snow in a winter, you kind of want to lead towards a La Nina winter, there have been El Nino winters that I've given that a decent amount of snow too. But La Nina typically gives us our best shot at some snow. So once again, as we get into the fall, we'll have a little bit more on the fall forecast, but we do typically turn a little bit snowy into La Nina winters. It's been a couple of years since we had a La Nina and it's been kind of dry the past couple of years. So we'll see if things change going into winter 2024 to 2025. Once again, this isn't a way to knock the farmer's almanac. A lot of people love getting that book. There's a lot of good information in that book as well. We just want to take a closer look. Ok, how accurate is it for Central Indiana? And we found gotta take it, you know, a little bit skeptical on what it's forecasting. Wet, white and cold. That's a winter in here in Indiana. How white is it gonna be? We'll have to see.