A Forecasting Prizefight |
 Dave Thurlow, Host |
Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow for The Weather Notebook. In a battle of long range forecasting, we're pitting the wooly bear caterpillar against the computer. You all know what a computer is and you see its forecasting aptitude every night on the weather report. But what's a wooly bear?
Wooly bears are fuzzy caterpillars. They're a couple inches long, black, with a brown band around the middle. The folktale says that if the brown band is wide, then the winter will be mild and if the brown band is narrow, then get ready for deep snow and cold well into April. It's a charming way to forecast the weather but, unfortunately, it doesn't appear to be stacking up against the computer.
The American Museum of Natural History actually found no connection between wooly bear stripes and winter weather. The wooly bear caterpillar is the common name for the larva of dozen or so different species of Tiger Moths. In the life cycle of this family of moths, every other generation of larva gets to spend the winter tucked under some log. So, you can often see these caterpillars crawling about in the fall looking for a winter hang out. The fact that you see them more some years probably got people thinking they knew something we didn't about the upcoming winter.
In an agricultural society, where these sayings developed, deep snow all winter was good for the soil, so these signs may have been simply wishful thinking. But in a technical world, though it's nice to think that animals can sense atmospheric subtleties, it's the computer that wins out. But, in all fairness, I don't know of any computers that can spin a cocoon.
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