Now that summer is nearing its end and fall is roughly a month out, the time has come to speculate about how mild or rough winter will be!
The Old Farmer's Almanac has released its winter 2018-19 predictions, and overall it's looking like most of the U.S. won't have to worry much about snow this coming winter.
The almanac is predicting a warm and wet winter for most of the Eastern U.S. including Tennessee and Kentucky.
The rest of the U.S. varies between mild and snowy in the Cascades region, to warm and dry in the Central U.S.
Likewise, the almanac also released its predictions for next summer -- and it's calling for cool and wet weather across Tennessee and the Southeast.
The track record for the almanac has been pretty good. In 2018, it called for a cold and snowy winter for Tennessee. It was mostly an average year for snow, but we definitely ended up seeing quite a few bitterly cold winter days.
The almanac said it uses solar science, climatology and meteorology to predict trends and events in the weather by comparing solar patterns and historical weather conditions.
While the Old Farmer's Almanac a go-to standard for these sorts of predictions, they aren't always on the nose (it claims it's traditionally been about 80 percent accurate).
So if you were sorely hoping for a lot of snow this winter, don't lose hope yet! You could always turn to obscure folklore for your winter predictions!
For example, the Hiwassee/Ocoee State Park will engage in the fine art of using persimmon seeds to predict the coming winter, and on the third week of October the town of Banner Elk, N.C. will have a bunch of woolly worms race each other for the honor of predicting winter.
If you don't trust the validity of persimmons or racing caterpillars, you could also just wait a couple of months for Todd Howell to look at all the climate conditions that will be in play to deliver a forecast backed up by decades of data and meteorology. He was pretty much spot-on with his winter outlook last year.