Seer of Seers
Sage of Sages
Prognosticator of Prognosticators
Weather Prophet Extraordinary
So reads the official title of Punxsutawney Phil, the worldās most famous weather-predicting groundhog/woodchuck/marmot/whistle pig (yes, they are, in fact, all the same animalā¦ surprises abound in the world of meteorological mammals).Ā
Phil hails from the town of Punxsutawney, PA, where every year on February 2, a group of grown men sporting top hats and waxed mustaches pull him out of a box and ask him when winter will end.Ā I can never keep straight whether seeing the shadow means spring will come early or if weāll have a long winter, but this doesnāt really matter, since rodents are not good weather prediction tools.
Despite being about as reliable as a coin flip, Phil is joined in this annual tradition by more than a dozen North American groundhogs like Shubenecadie Sam, General Beauregard Lee, and Wisconsonās humbly-named Jimmy the Groundhog, seen here:
Surprise! Groundhogs can bite! And I would too, if you forcibly removed me from my warm, comfy house, held me aloft in the frigid air in front of thousands of gaping onlookers and flashing lights and asked me about a subject in which I have no expertise.
Rodents might not be real educated in the fields of meteorology and astronomy, but humans are! Weāve got Earthās orbital mechanics and their corresponding effect on annual temperature cycles down to a literal science. We smart. Just lookā¦
I dug into the science of seasons this week, and I discovered that our system of defining āwinterā and āsummerā and āspringā and āautumnā, at least the way that most of us non-meteorologists think of them, doesnāt really make sense when you compare it to the weather.Ā
You might already know that we define āwinterā or āsummerā based on Earthās position in relation to the sun, namely the solstices. This makes the seasons easy to keep track of, but for most of us these dates are unreliable, illogical, and remarkably disconnected from the actual weather.Ā The little boxes on your calendar that say āFirst Day of Winterā, āFirst Day of Springā and so on donāt line up very well with how cold or hot it is outside.
Unfortunately, thatās what happens when you try to apply a single calendar to an entire planetā¦ could there be a better way?
You can learn the rest of the story by watching this weekās Itās Okay To Be Smart up at the top of this post. Enjoy!
