Old Farmer’s Almanac predicting wetter and colder winter in 2025

Posted on September 19, 2024 by Taber Times

By Trevor Busch
Taber Times
editor@tabertimes.com

“Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”

Often attributed to Mark Twain, the famous quote above actually flowed from the pen of Charles Dudley Warner, a novelist and friend of the American icon. 

No matter who said what, no one would argue the weather isn’t something of interest or concern to everyone. And it’s the great leveller – billionaires can no more make the rain stop than the lowliest labourer grunting in the field.

Predicting today’s weather is a cutting-edge scientific exercise replete with innovative technologies, but it’s still far from perfect. And no matter how good it might be, we still can’t walk between the raindrops.

Hearkening back to the late 18th century when weather prediction as we know it today was still in its infancy, the Old Farmer’s Almanac has been making weather predictions with varying degrees of success since its founding in 1792.

To get a feel for what’s in store for Western Canada in 2025 within the pages of the beloved periodical, the Times sat down with editor-in-chief Carol Connare to find out if her publication’s prognostications are more than just hot air. Famously proprietary, the Almanac’s formula for analyzing and predicting long-term weather patterns involves much more than just traditional weather forecasting.

“We have our own team at AccuWeather, they sort of have the short-term weather forecasting all locked up, but they use our formula that we’ve used since 1792, and it’s really the same formula,” said Connare. “But of course, now we have supercomputing, so a lot more data can go into it. What makes us different is certainly lots of people look at climatology and meteorology, and we do too, but our founder (Robert B. Thomas) was very much set on this idea of sun science and sunspots. So the sun goes through these cycles every 11 or 12 years. We just started cycle 26 so people are seeing aurora borealis further south. You know that sunspot activity – now, this doesn’t mean that ‘Oh, if there’s a solar flare, it’s going to be warm.’ What that means is that the solar activity, when it’s at its height, affects things like the jet stream, or the oceans may be moving slower and being warmer because of that, or it affects things that affect the weather. So it’s not a direct correlation. But what happens is that we can look at a pattern and say, okay, is this year nine of the solar cycle? What were the other year nines like that have this similar pattern of jet stream or ocean oscillations? And we can really crunch that data as well as looking at the other side. But I’ll tell you, with a warming world, it’s a little trickier. And the thing that’s got us is those really heavy precipitation events where we’re seeing in one hour a storm is putting more than a place would see in a month. So those are really hard to predict. I’d say that’s confounding our weather folks.”

Connare says southern Albertans should expect a wetter and slightly colder winter in 2024-2025.

“I think that if you look overall, you are really in an aberrant area having the wet, because we’re looking at pretty mild and dry in some snowy regions, but I think we’re looking at your region to be the wettest and also a little bit colder than normal. And so when we look at normal precipitation and snowfall we just are calling for a bit more, a bit cooler and a bit more we’re looking at that it’s going to be the coldest in early and late December, early and late January and mid to late February, and that the snowiest times will be mid to late November. So that’s kind of early, I think, you know, to get really snowy, maybe not early and late December, but also January, mid February and early March. So that’s when we’re calling for some storms. You’re probably going to get a mix because wet also doesn’t just mean snow, so it sort of depends on the temperatures. But I think we are seeing mild generally, but really in that prairie area that can really get those Arctic blasts, our long range forecasters are thinking it’s going to be cool.”

Looking further ahead, spring 2025 may shape up to be ideal conditions for southern Alberta growers.

“When I look at the precipitation chart, every single month is either normal or above. So it’s going to be wet. And then your coldest months are going to be January and February. I think the good news we’re calling for a nice, warm spring. So hopefully that will give some relief by that time. I don’t think we were calling for a big difference from the east to the west. Just looking at my book here, no, we didn’t really distinguish that. So I think that’s really what we’re saying overall, not calling out any certain area but you’re probably going to be one of the few areas in North America that has some consistent snow. So that’s kind of nice.”

Connare says long-range weather patterns are more easy to predict, but extreme weather events remain very difficult to pin down with any degree of accuracy.

“We’re talking about you really having consistently more precipitation than normal for what we’re seeing, really every month of the year. So I think that’s the story, which is better than drought. If I was a grower or a farmer I think one of the hardest things that we talk about with our long range weather forecasters is we’ve been using the same formula, but we’re really seeing a lot of extreme rain events. We’re seeing more rain come in a shorter amount of time, almost with every storm. And that’s because, there’s more water in the atmosphere, and that’s due to warmer oceans and a slower jet stream. And so what happens is that the middle of our continent really gets some of that wilder stuff, like we’re getting, whether it’s in the form of snowflakes or raindrops.”

Moving on to the summer of 2025 on the Prairies, Connare says to expect slightly cooler temperatures than we experienced in 2024.

“We’re calling for a little cooler August than usual, on your end of things, but they’re going to have a pretty warm summer – we’re looking at it being another warm summer across North America. We just had the hottest July ever on record. And so we’re not calling for it to necessarily be that, but I think that we are saying that your wet is still going to continue. I think you’re going to have mild weather, but some storms. I think that’s what your story is going to be.”

Although people most often think of weather predictions when they pick up a copy of the Old Farmer’s Almanac, the historic publication has much more than weather to pique the interest of the casual reader.

“I think people tend to want to know the weather, because we’re growers, we have gardens, or we’re farmers, or we just like to be outside. So those are the kinds of things you find in the almanac,” said Connare. “You find all kinds of gardening information. Same with almanac.com you can punch in your zip code wherever you are in North America, and get your planting dates and your frost dates by zip code. Also we have a lot of astronomy as a really big area of interest for us and our readers. And again, we want to know, is there going to be a stretch of clear skies where I can see that planet in conjunction with another planet? So we have a lot of sky watching data. And it’s really not just data. It’s like telling you what you’ll see and when to look and how to see it. So those are really popular. Tomatoes – people can’t get enough of tomatoes. So we always have tomato stories. And I think something other people love is trends. You know, we’re always talking about what’s new, especially in the areas of home and garden and farm and food and pets.”

In the past, people might remember seeing the Almanac for sale in line at the grocery check-out, but the 2025 Canadian edition is available in local hardware stores and many other retail locations, but can also be purchased at almanac.com or via Amazon.ca. 

“You know, I don’t think you can get a better source of information and entertainment for every day of the year for less than $10. It’s still $9.99, and it’s packed with something for every day. So we pride ourselves on that,” said Connare.