Predicting the Weather, Timing a Haircut

Checking out the Old Farmer’s Almanac one recent morning I read:

• The sun rose at 6:44 EST and will fall at 4:17.

• The day is barely nine hours 33 minutes bright — and days will get darker until mid-January.

• High tide at Boston is 11:45 a.m.

• We’re two days past a new moon; the orb rises tonight at 8:48 p.m. and sets at 5:11 the next morning.

• It’s one of the best days of the month to cut your hair to encourage growth. A Guernsey cow impregnated today will bear a calf in 283 days, give or take. So will a Holstein or Jersey.

• We’ve just missed the late planting season for spinach, though if you put winter wheat seeds in the ground, they have a good chance of germinating.

• It will be cold today, with the likelihood of snow showers. If it snows 15 inches of dry, powdery fluff, that’s the equivalent of 1 inch of rain.

• And as a word of wisdom, "Life is simpler when you plow around the stump."

I gleaned all this from a few pages of The Old Farmer’s 2007 Almanac.

Comparable information is available for the other 364 days of the year, which makes the Almanac a fun book to keep at bedside, to consult before shutting out the light at night, or to peruse while you’re waiting for the coffee to perc.

Almanacs have clung to life despite the advent of nuclear fission, disposable lighters, iPods and The Weather Channel. The Old Farmer’s harkens to Robert B. Thomas’s original, which was for the year 1793. Certainly there have been changes in the yearly volumes. This one, the 215th, has articles about baby names, whistling, ways to impress the opposite sex and a schedule of eclipses. Except for the eclipses, none of these items would have impressed a post-Revolutionary War generation. (Well, maybe iPods would have.)

Whether it’s the main reason or not that most people buy the almanac, Old Farmer’s touts its reputation for weather predictions.

"Watch Out! Another Wild Year Ahead," reads a cover banner. The almanac probably shouldn’t be accountable to the specific day; it won’t guarantee fine weather for a July 12th picnic — but it does afford

generalities that, over the generations, have been reasonably accurate.

The 2007 edition offers an unusual glance behind the scenes. It pays tribute to Richard M. Head, who died in January 2006. Head was a weather scientist. He was particularly knowledgeable about sunspots and solar flares and how they influenced Earth’s atmosphere. He would advise NASA on the best likely times to hurl Apollo rockets into space. And since 1970, he was the almanac’s "Abe Weatherwise," making educated guesses about our dry and wet, our hot and cold, our windy and still times.

What’s curious about this tribute to Head is that the almanac has long claimed it used a secret and exotic formula based on sunspots to figure out the weather. If the formula was so good — why did it need a scientist? "We thank him for bringing state-of-the-art science to our predictions — and for his career-average 87 percent accuracy rate regarding sunspot activity," the almanac says.

Just before the weather pages, there’s another message that says, in part: "We believe that nothing happens haphazardly, that there is a cause-and-effect pattern to all phenomena. However, although neither we nor any other forecasters have as yet gained sufficient insight into the mysteries of the universe to predict the weather with total accuracy, our results are almost always very close to our traditional claim of 80 percent."

So, what does the almanac-seer have in store for us?

• There will be a weak El Nino.

• Temperatures will be below norm.

• Snow will be above norm.

• Spring will come early.

• Summer will be mild.

• And, "A major hurricane will threaten the Northeast in late September."

That’s my report on this year’s Old Farmer’s Almanac. Excuse me while I go phone in an order for a few sheets of plywood.