Modern Mysteries

How often is Punxsutawney Phil right ?

By T.K. Randall
February 3, 2015 ·  15 comments

Punxsutawney Phil during the Groundhog Day celebrations. Image Credit: CC BY-SA 2.0 Anthony Quintano It was the bane of Bill Murray's existence in the 1993 Harold Ramis movie, but despite being an unlikely premise the actual Groundhog Day ceremony is a real thing that still takes place at the beginning of February each year across the United States.

Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog in the movie, continues to be part of the largest Groundhog Day celebration in Pennsylvania where large crowds still gather in anticipation of finding out whether or not spring is likely to arrive early.

According to the tradition, if the groundhog emerges and sees its own shadow then there will be six more weeks of winter whereas if it sees no shadow then the warmer weather will arrive sooner.To determine just how accurate Punxsutawney Phil actually is at predicting the seasons a team at the Washington Post brought together and analyzed temperature statistics for the last 30 years.

What they found was that while Phil's predictions were correct more often than not for some areas of the country, the overall average temperature between the years in which he predicted a longer winter and the years in which he predicted an early spring varied by only a few degrees.

In other words Phil's predictions have boiled down to little more than random chance.

Source: Live Science | Comments (15)

Tags: Groundhog Day, Prediction