Is the Farmers' Almanac Accurate? We Checked It Against the Record

The Scorecard: How Its Forecasts Actually Did

Three independent attempts to grade almanac forecasts against observed weather, across four decades. They used different methods and different years, and they agree: the skill is around a coin flip.

The most rigorous of the three is the most recent. Colorado Climate Center scientist Peter Goble built a scoring system and ran the Farmers' Almanac's 2019–2024 winter calls against both the observed record and 10,000 sets of random forecasts. The almanac came out “only better than about 55% of” those random forecasts — and as Goble put it, “we cannot reject the hypothesis that the Farmer's Almanac makes winter forecasts equivalent in skill to picking randomly.” Over the same five winters, NOAA's Climate Prediction Center scored +24 in his system to the almanac's +1.

There's a catch that cuts in the almanac's favor and against it at once: a lot of its wording is too vague to score at all. Goble notes that describing a winter as “Glacial, Snow-Filled” can't be objectively graded. That ambiguity is exactly why the forecasts “feel” right — a call broad enough to cover a whole region over a whole season will always match something that happens.

Our Own Check: the Last Two Winters

To put our data where our mouth is, we ran the last two completed winters through our NOAA archive. For a 12-city national basket — Minneapolis to Miami, Seattle to Boston — we averaged the December–February temperature and compared it to each city's 1991–2020 norm. Here's the problem the almanac's broad “cold winter” framing runs into:

• Winter 2024–25 came in at about 0.4°F below normal across the basket — essentially a normal winter.
• Winter 2025–26 came in about 0.4°F above normal in the national mean — but that tidy average hid a split the size of the country: the Northeast ran cold (New York 4°F below normal, Boston and Washington 3–4° below) while the West and Plains ran warm (Denver 8°F above, Dallas and Kansas City 3–4° above).

This is the whole game. A single national call — “cold and snowy” — can't be right or wrong in a winter where half the country is well below normal and the other half well above, and the average lands within half a degree of par. Modern forecasting answers that by going regional and probabilistic and updating monthly. An almanac printed a year or more early can't. (This is a 12-station spot-check, not an official national index — it's an illustration, not a verdict. The verdict is the independent studies above.)

How the Almanac Says It Forecasts — and Why That's a Problem

The Farmers' Almanac says it has used “a proprietary long-range forecasting formula since 1818” built on “correlations between celestial cycles, solar activity (including sunspot cycles), lunar motion, and observed meteorological patterns.” The Old Farmer's Almanac describes a similar secret formula, devised by founder Robert B. Thomas in 1792, that leans on solar science — especially sunspots — plus climatology and historical analogs.

The trouble isn't that sunspots and lunar cycles are meaningless; it's that there's no demonstrated path from “where the moon is in 2028” to “how much snow Cleveland gets next February.” The atmosphere is chaotic, and skillful day-by-day forecasting runs out well short of a single season, never mind the year-plus lead time an almanac needs to go to print. That's why the serious seasonal product — NOAA's — doesn't give you a date-by-date story. It gives you tilted odds, and revises them every month. For the mechanics of how an official reading even becomes a record, see our explainer on how a weather record is verified.

Where the “80% Accurate” Number Comes From

You'll see “about 80% accurate” repeated everywhere, usually with no asterisk. Here's the asterisk: it's the almanacs' grade of themselves. The Old Farmer's Almanac says it “correctly predict[s] the direction of seasonal temperature and precipitation departures from normal about 80% of the time” — and, in its own words, that “does not mean that every daily temperature or precipitation event is predicted correctly.” So the 80% isn't a day-by-day or town-by-town hit rate. It's a self-scored tally of whether a whole season tilted warmer or cooler, wetter or drier, than average — a bar low enough that you start near a coin flip before you write a word.

This is the same trap we wrote about when the press called 2026 the hottest summer on record: the number depends entirely on how you define the test. Independent scorers who set the bar at “did this beat random guessing?” get 52%. The publishers, scoring themselves on seasonal direction, get 80%. Both numbers are real; only one is a measure of forecasting skill. (We unpack that define-the-test problem in detail in was summer 2026 really the hottest on record.)

Farmers' Almanac vs. Old Farmer's Almanac vs. NOAA

People use the two almanac names interchangeably; they're separate companies. The Old Farmer's Almanac (1792, New Hampshire) is the elder. The Farmers' Almanac (1818, Maine) is a different publication, with its own secret formula and its own forecaster. Both market a long-standing ~80% self-assessment; both come out near a coin flip when outsiders score them.

The real alternative is NOAA's Climate Prediction Center. It doesn't promise a snowy February for your town a year out. It publishes probability maps — a lean toward warmer, cooler, wetter or drier than normal — grounded in the current state of the Pacific, and it updates them monthly. For planning anything with real stakes, the state climatologist's advice is blunt: defer to CPC. That's doubly true this year, because this isn't a normal winter.

So Should You Trust It This Winter?

The Farmers' Almanac's 2026–27 call is “Snow, Sleet, and Surprises” — a wetter southern storm track and a stop-start North — and it leans on El Niño, which is the one honest thing in it, because a real, measurable Super El Niño genuinely is setting up this winter. The difference is that NOAA and our own historical data can tell you what a Super El Niño actually tends to do, city by city, from decades of past El Niño winters — a secret sunspot formula can't.

So use the almanac for what it's good at: tradition, garden dates, a fun long-range vibe. For whether to buy the snowblower, use the data. Start with NOAA's official 2026–27 winter outlook and what the El Niño analogs show, see specifically what a Super El Niño does to snow (hint: the northern snow belt usually gets less, the Mid-Atlantic more), and track where the Pacific actually stands on our El Niño 2026 tracker. Those are forecasts you can check — and we'll be grading ourselves against the record in the spring, which is more than the almanac will do.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources & Method

Accuracy findings: the 1981 University of Illinois study and the ~52% figure are reported by McGill University's Office for Science and Society; the 2010 Weatherwise figure and Peter Goble's 2019–2024 scoring are from the Colorado Climate Center. The almanacs' own descriptions and the ~80% self-claim are from the Farmers' Almanac and the Old Farmer's Almanac. Our winter-anomaly spot-check is computed from NOAA GHCN-Daily via our database: for a 12-city basket, the mean daily temperature over December–February per winter, compared to each station's 1991–2020 mean (bad readings excluded). See our data sources & methodology page. Verified October 19, 2026.