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Six More Weeks of Winter Say the Experts

Feb
2
2010

ground-hog-day-predictionsThe vote is in and Punxsutawney Phil, Spanish Joe, Dunkirk Dave and Shubenacadie Sam all agree that we are headed for six more weeks of shovelling driveways. With Wiarton Willie and Balzac Bill still to report it looks like we have a quorum.

The origins of Groundhog Day are somewhat ‘foggy’, but an early American reference to Groundhog Day can be found in a diary entry, dated February 5, 1841, of Berks County, Pennsylvania storekeeper James Morris:

“Last Tuesday, the 2nd, was Candlemas day, the day on which, according to the Germans, the Groundhog peeps out of his winter quarters and if he sees his shadow he pops back for another six weeks nap, but if the day be cloudy he remains out, as the weather is to be moderate.”

The origin of Groundhog Day may actually be somewhat more prosaic.

In western countries in the Northern Hemisphere the official first day of Spring is almost seven weeks (46–48 days) after Groundhog Day, on March 20 or March 21. About 1,000 years ago, before the adoption of the Gregorian calendar when the date of the equinox drifted in the Julian calendar, the spring equinox fell on March 16 instead. This is exactly six weeks after February 2. The custom could have been a folk embodiment of the confusion created by the collision of two calendrical systems. Some ancient traditions marked the change of season at cross-quarter days such as Imbolc when daylight first makes significant progress against the night. Other traditions held that Spring did not begin until the length of daylight overtook night at the Vernal Equinox. So an arbiter, the groundhog/hedgehog, was incorporated as a yearly custom to settle the two traditions. Sometimes Spring begins at Imbolc, and sometimes Winter lasts 6 more weeks until the equinox.

Now listening to four small, furry rodents may not be your idea of modern meteorology but they might just have a better handle on the situation than somebody in a windowless office in Toronto staring at a computer screen.

And I hear they work for peanuts…

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The Teeswater.Ca Team are a group of people interested in providing local news of interest to everyone without needing the instant gratification of their name in (cyber)print.

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This work by Mark W. Law & The Teeswater.Ca Team is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada.