How to Read the Weather Almanac

The Weather Almanac is ThoroughWiz's weather section, at thoroughwiz.com/weather/. It is a reading page, not a forecast service: it takes a public model blend for your town, sets the Old Farmer's Almanac's winter outlook for your region beside it, and adds the moon and a daily weather saying. Every part is labeled for what it is. This guide walks the page top to bottom.

Your town, and the week ahead

Open the page and it asks your browser for your location, then names the town it found. If you would rather not share a location, type a town or a ZIP code into the search instead. With neither, the page opens on Horseheads, New York, the lab's home town. The top of the page shows current conditions for that town — temperature, sky, and wind — followed by The Week Ahead: seven cards, one for each of the next seven days, each with its icon, its forecast high and low, and its chance of precipitation.

Where the forecast comes from

The forecast is a blend. Open-Meteo, a free public weather service, merges the runs of several national weather models — NOAA's GFS from the United States, the ECMWF model from Europe, Germany's ICON, and more — into one feed, and the Almanac page loads that feed directly in your browser when you open it. Temperatures print in Fahrenheit, wind in miles per hour, precipitation in inches, and every time is on your town's own clock.

A blend is a merge of model runs, not a promise. The models agree most about the next day or two and least about days five through seven, so read the far end of the week as the least settled part of the page. Another weather service, working from a different mix of the same public models, will give your town somewhat different numbers; that is the normal state of forecasting, not an error on either side. The data carries its credit on the page: weather data by Open-Meteo, under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Reading the range bars

Each day card carries a horizontal bar under its numbers. The bar spans that day's low to its high, and it is placed against the whole week's temperature range: the coldest low and the warmest high of the seven days set the scale, and every day is drawn on that same scale. A short bar sitting at the left is a cold day that stays cold. A long bar reaching to the right is the week's warm day. The bars let you see the shape of the week — a warm-up building, a cold snap passing — without reading a single number. Blue drops on a card give that day's chance of precipitation.

The first panel below the week, The Models Say, turns the same forecast into plain sentences: how the week runs, where its warm and cold ends fall, and which days look wet. It is a summary of the numbers above it, written from them — it adds no information of its own.

The Almanac Says: the season, not the week

The Old Farmer's Almanac, published since 1792, issues a winter outlook for 18 regions of North America. The second panel, The Almanac Says, prints that outlook for your region, summarized in our words, credited to the Almanac on the panel, with a link to the Almanac's own winter forecast pages. Farther down, the page prints the full region-by-region table for winter 2026–27 with your region marked, so you can read the whole country's outlook, not just your corner of it.

An outlook answers a different question from a forecast. It is a seasonal lean — whether a region's winter is expected to run milder or colder, snowier or drier than usual — and it cannot say anything about a particular day. The model blend handles the week; the Almanac handles the season. The page prints both because readers ask both questions.

Signs & the Moon: folklore, labeled as folklore

The third panel mixes one piece of arithmetic with one piece of tradition. The moon is the arithmetic: the page computes tonight's moon from its cycle and prints its phase name, its shape, and the percentage of it lit. That part is astronomy, and it is exact.

The sign of the day is the tradition: a weather saying, rotating through the old lore the almanacs have carried for two centuries — the kind of line about red skies, ringed moons, and what a month brings in or takes out. Some sayings preserve a real observation; many do not. They are printed as entertainment, in the spirit of the almanacs that made room for them, and the panel labels them as folklore. Do not plan a week around one.

The talk of the season: a strong El Niño

One panel is rewritten as the season's story changes. This winter's story is El Niño. NOAA's Climate Prediction Center gives the current event better than 90% odds of reaching "very strong" through the winter of 2026–27. An event of that size usually tilts the country milder overall, with wetter weather across parts of the West and South. The panel states this with its links to NOAA and the National Weather Service, so the claim sits next to its source.

"Usually tilts" is the honest form of that sentence. A strong El Niño loads the dice for a season; it does not deal any given week. A cold week inside a mild-leaning winter is not a contradiction, and neither the Almanac panel nor this guide will treat it as one.

What this page does not claim

ThoroughWiz publishes no accuracy score for the Almanac and keeps no record grading its forecasts against outcomes. The blend is described here, not praised: it is a public service's merge of public models, presented plainly. The Almanac outlook is one publisher's seasonal call, printed with attribution. The sayings are folklore. For watches, warnings, and storms, the National Weather Service is the authority — the Almanac is where you read the week, not where you ride out the weather. It is also the one ThoroughWiz section with nothing to file: no picks, no ledger, nothing to settle.