It’s Groundhog Day, and it has felt like the movie in Rochester the past few days as we have seen virtually the same weather over and over. Regardless, Punxsutawney Phil came out of his home Friday morning and gave the forecast on the rest of winter and he did NOT see his shadow –which means an early spring. Or at least he thinks so. There’s no way a cave dweller can predict the medium- and long-range weather better than people who went to college for four or more years to study basic chaos theory, right? That’s where today’s “In-Depth” comes in — it is time to prove if Punxsutawney Phil is legit or a fraud! With that said, let’s take the last 10 February and March temperatures for Rochester, N.Y. and compare them to Punxsutawney Phil’s forecast:

YEAR	PHIL’S FORECAST	FEBRUARY TEMPS	MARCH TEMPS	RIGHT OR WRONG
2014	LATE WINTER	BELOW	BELOW	RIGHT
2015	LATE WINTER	BELOW	BELOW	RIGHT
2016	EARLY SPRING	ABOVE	ABOVE	RIGHT
2017	LATE WINTER	ABOVE	BELOW	HALF RIGHT
2018	LATE WINTER	ABOVE	BELOW	HALF RIGHT
2019	EARLY SPRING	ABOVE	BELOW	WRONG
2020	EARLY SPRING	ABOVE	ABOVE	RIGHT
2021	LATE WINTER	BELOW	ABOVE	WRONG
2022	LATE WINTER	BELOW	ABOVE	WRONG
2023	LATE WINTER	ABOVE	NORMAL	WRONG

As you can see in the chart above, Phil had a good track record for us in Rochester from 2014-18; however, since then the wheels have begun to fall off the wagon. Sure, no one is perfect, but to claim to be America’s Meteorologist and have generally less than a 50% verification puts Phil in the FRAUD category. I’ll tell you a weather team that aren’t frauds, and that’s the First Alert Weather Team. So instead of relying on your forecast from someone who spends most of their life underground, stick with the team you can trust.