Punxsutawney Phil was right last year about having an early spring.
Across Pennsylvania, temperatures for both February and March were above average in 2016. Several regions also saw record daily temperatures during that period.
However, Punxsutawney Phil, Seer of Seers, Sage of Sages, Prognosticator of Prognosticators and Weather Prophet Extraordinary does not have a perfect track record for his 131 years on the job.
We dug into the data to see just how often he and his handlers get it right.
“Unfortunately, there have been years where the president has misinterpreted what Phil said,” handler Ron Ploucha told PennLive last year. “Because Phil’s never wrong. Phil’s prediction is 100 percent correct, and we blame the variants on the president’s interpretation of Phil’s prediction.”
Indeed, having two options doesn’t provide much wiggle room. Either he sees his shadow and winter continues for six more weeks, or he doesn’t and we get an early spring. Holding Phil accountable only for Pennsylvania weather, we determined criteria for what counted as spring conditions (see methods below) and compared his predictions to historical data.
In 117 years of bonus veren bahis siteleri available records, our calculations show Phil and his translators have been correct about 65 percent of the time.
Some quick facts:
- The longest streak of correct predictions is 12 years, which occurred from 1958-1969. Phil did not see his shadow on Groundhog Day any of those years.
- His longest streak of incorrect predictions (or incorrect translations, perhaps) is three years, which occurred from 1948-1950 and again from 2011-2013.
- According to The Punxsutawney Groundhog Club’s records, Phil has only predicted an early spring 17 times.
Browse the data yourself:
Click here to load this Caspio Cloud Database Cloud Database by Caspio
This data encompasses nearly all 131 years Punxsutawney Phil has served as prognosticator. Weather data was not available prior to 1895, and records of Phil’s predictions were spotty before 1900.
There was also one day Phil didn’t show up to work in 1943.
This analysis also takes into account statewide minimum, maximum and average temperatures for February and March dating back to 1898 from the National Centers for Environmental Information.
To further analyze each year, we also looked at average precipitation, historical snowfall extremes by county and record temperatures in Harrisburg, Erie, Scranton and Pittsburgh for data points across the state.
Jojobet The history of Groundhog Day and Punxsutawney Phil
Methods: Temperature data was given the most weight in determining which years experienced an early spring. All points above 32 degrees Fahrenheit (freezing temperature) or above average for February earned a tick in the “early spring” column. For March, “early spring” temperatures were adjusted to more than 41.6 degrees (32 plus the difference between monthly median temperatures) and above average for the month.
For years not determined based on temperature data alone, precipitation averages were gathered and historical extremes — greatest one-day snowfall, record lows, etc. — served as tiebreakers. Years that remained a tie after that point were designated “winter.”
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
