It’s no secret that the Old Farmer’s Almanac is a relatively reliable source of weather prediction, with a track record of having a level of accuracy that could, arguably, top the environmental weather centres. But what is their secret?

According to Jack Burnett with the Old Farmer’s Almanac, there is no secret, but there is a formula – an ancient, tried and tested formula.

“We’ve been around for 227 years now, and we still use the same formula, more or less, that we used in 1792 when we first started,” said Burnett.

“That takes into account meteorology, which are your local weather factors, and air masses, and topographical figures and so forth,” he explained. “We take into account climatology, which is the long term weather trends in an area, and the third thing is solar science or solar radiation.”

He said they collect all of the measurement observations that have been made for the area that have ever been found by Environment Canada and its predecessors. They use computers, applying their own algorithm.

“We look at the pattern of the present, like right now, the past few months, years, and so on, and we try to find the pattern for Weyburn or wherever, that most closely resembles the present,” explained Burnett. “We go back in the past and we see what happened next, back then.”

Usually, the Old Farmer’s Almanac is around 80 per cent accurate.

“Sometimes we’re not, sometimes we’re a little bit greater than that,” he said. “But we always spend a lot of time and actually a fair amount of money every year to make sure that we analyze our results.”

He said last year, in fact, they were over 80 per cent accurate, but that doesn’t mean they’re resting on their laurels.

“Of course, if our ways of doing this are going off the rails, we want to be the first to know, and not the last.

Can their method still be applied, given the strange weather pattern past few years?

“We’ve been trying to make sure that we’re on top of things,” he said. “We’ve started to incorporate some little tweaks into our ancient ways to account for the warming that’s been going on, and we’re into the second of a three-year test, and so far so good.”

He added the Old Farmer’s Almanac has a high regard for Environment Canada.

“They do their thing, we do ours. I say often that it’s like making soup,” he said. “You know, we both make our weather forecast soup. We use the same ingredients, because we use the same scientific data that Environment Canada does, and we put it into our pots, and we put it in in a little different proportions, and maybe we stir it in a little different way, but at the end of the day, Environment Canada has its weather forecast soup, and we have ours, and usually most people like both.”