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Polish weather proverbs: True or false?

"Hot July leads to frosts in January", " From the Saint Anne Day evenings and mornings will be cooler", " For Saint Wit crops will flourish". Such folk sayings are an expression of the collective wisdom of many generations. For hundreds of years, they helped farmers and sailors to predict the weather. But are they still valid? Scientists analyzed the proverbs’ accuracies.

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The results of the research have just appeared in the Weather, Climate and Society journal. Researchers tested 28 weather-related proverbs (selected from the corpus of more than 2000 Polish proverbs) against available temperature records for 20 weather stations. Meteorological data was collected from Poland and neighboring countries over the last 62 years.

Conclusions

It turns out that for most proverbs, the success rate of their predictions is low. Only a few tested proverbs provide relatively reliable forecast. It is related to the weather variability. Moreover, those sayings mainly refer to relatively rare phenomena.

Scientists have found that March and February weather sayings are a bit more accurate in forecasting the weather, although the proverbs as such are less known, i.e. "When Zbigniew and Patrick (17 March) are freezing people’s ears, on two more Sundays winter freezing and snows ", " If Saint Matthew (24 February), does not melt ice, peasants will long puff to warm their cold hands".

In addition, the proverb accuracy decreased significantly over time. This situation may be related to climate change.

Interestingly, the further north and east the weather stations are situated the greater success in predictions. As the results reveal the highest proverb accuracies were observed in meteorological stations in Mińsk (Belarus), Suwałki and Vilnius (Lithuania). It can be attributed to the territorial changes of Poland after World War II and related westward migrations.

Authors of the publication

The study on the Polish weather proverb accuracies was conducted by the following team of researchers:
• Prof. Piotr Matczak (Faculty of Sociology, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań),
• Dariusz Graczyk, PhD, Adam Choryński, PhD, Iwona Pińskwar, PhD (Institute for Agricultural and Forest Environment of the Polish Academy of Sciences),
• Viktoria Takacs, PhD (Poznań University of Life Sciences).

Source of information: PAS Institute for Agricultural and Forest Environment

Publication: Temperature Forecast Accuracies of Polish Proverbs