Meteorologists promise a cold February: will the beginning of spring be predicted for the next Badger Day?

There are also future-oriented ones, such as: during Martynas tea (November 11), during Christmas braška or Martynas kala, I burn for Christmas; cold at Christmas, white at Easter; Cold January, July will be hot; if it is cold in February, it will be a hot summer, and so on

One of the best known predictions, not only in Lithuania, is the “prediction” of the end of winter according to the time of mid-winter (January 25), more precisely, according to the behavior of Badger on this day. And here even the question arises about the assumption itself. Here is the ethnologist dr. Libertas Klimka says: Badger wakes up in his cave. Sleeping he puts his head to look around him. If the sun shines, he can scare his shadow and then fall back into the cave. However, sleeping on the lying side will be quite poor, and the snow will fall quickly and spring will come early. If he gets drunk, Badger works out well in the woods, breathes fresh air and follows in his footsteps everywhere. When he returns, it will be difficult, we will not have spring soon, it will be late and it will be cold. ” ..

However, in Suwalki it is believed that if the sun shines that day, Badger comes out of the cave, sees his shadow, gets scared, and goes back into the cave to sleep; it will be a long winter. Well, if you cover up, go for a walk, sleep, sleep, and don’t go back to bed, spring will come soon.

An analogous superstition is occurring in the US and Canada, only here it is based on a whistle: badgers do not live on this continent. By the way, the whistle leaves the cave not on January 25, but on February 2. and this day is called Whistleblower Day in the United States.

The whistle was given the name Phil, and the assumption itself is closer to Suwalki’s: If a whistle coming out of a cave on February 2 sees its own shadow, it falls asleep again, which means that winter will last another six weeks. If the animal does not see its shadow, it does not return to the cave; then warmer weather awaits you, like early spring.

In Pennsylvania, the ceremony takes place in the early morning of February 2, just before the sun rises, at approximately eight thirty. Men in tailcoats and cylinder hats have been following the weather predicted by the whistle since 1886. It is true that the prediction accuracy of the American whistle is only 45 percent.

Well, let’s go back to Lithuania and let the facts speak, let’s see which assumption is closest to the truth. Relatively call them Ethnologist (E) and Suwalki (S). It will be recalled that winter begins when the constant mean daily air temperature drops below 0 ° C and ends when the air temperature rises and stays above 0 ° C. Let us accept that if the air temperature rises above zero for February 20. we will assume that winter ends early.

Let’s start with the last “real” winter, in 1995/96, when winter started in mid-November (on the beach in early December), there was no thaw, there was a lot of snow that only melted in April and winter ended at end of March-beginning of April. We take three weather stations, which measure the duration of insolation and which represent the eastern and central part of Lithuania and the coast: Vilnius, Kaunas and Klaipeda. That’s how long the sun shone in 1996. January 25th and when winter ended that year:

Thus, in 1996 The middle winter was sunny throughout Lithuania, and the winter lasted quite a long time; Suwalki’s guess was confirmed.

It is more difficult to evaluate the next memorable winter of last year (2019/20), and it is impossible to evaluate it more precisely, because winter has not started. And what does not begin cannot end. True, 2020 January 25 was cloudy in much of the country.

Let’s try to look at the 21st century. midwinter at a Kaunas weather station reflecting the central part of Lithuania. We assume that if the sun shone for more than 1 hour, the badger emerged just as it was shining and saw its shadow.

After all, in the 21st century, the ethnologist dr. Variant of L. Klimka (60 percent).

This result may be due to rapid climate change (we heard from older people that winters were deep and cold, and cold days in winter are sunnier), it is more likely that even in mid-winter the sun would shine brighter than it was cloudy.

Or maybe we would have completely different results if the badger observation process itself were defined more precisely: we don’t just have a badger “synoptic” and a competent monitoring commission (as in Pennsylvania), but also the exact time that the badger wakes up. he gets up and leaves his cave. It is possible that in 2000, 2002, 2004 or the following year, when the duration of the insolation was shorter, the Badger emerged when the sky was cloudy …

We will see what happens this year.

According to the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the February temperature is expected to be 1 ° C lower than this month’s multi-year average temperature, which is -2.5 ° C, with rainfall of up to 10% . higher than the multi-year standard (42 mm).