Don’t put those winter woollens away just yet. Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow Sunday and six more weeks of wintry weather are now predicted, his top-hatted handlers announced to a noisy, record-sized crowd at chilly Gobbler’s Knob in Pennsylvania.
AP reports the perky woodchuck was welcomed with chants of “Phil, Phil, Phil,” and delivered from a hatch on his tree stump shortly after sunrise before a member of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club read from a scroll in which he boasted: “Only I know — you can’t trust A.I.”
Phil’s weather forecast is an annual ritual that goes back more than a century in western Pennsylvania, with far older roots in European folklore, but it took Bill Murray’s 1993 Groundhog Day movie to transform the event into what it is today, with tens of thousands of revelers at the scene and imitators scattered around the country and beyond.
A crowd of over 40,000 waits for the weather report before Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow predicting six more weeks of winter during the 139th annual Groundhog Day festivities on Friday February 2, 2025 in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. (Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)
The U.S. state’s tradition of using a large rodent to predict the seasons dates back to the Pennsylvania Dutch belief that if a groundhog left its burrow and saw its shadow, it would scurry back inside and winter would go on for six more weeks.
Be that as it may, professional forecasters warned ahead of Phil’s appearance his prediction are likely to be way off the mark.
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has concluded that only 35 percent of Phil’s forecasts have proved to be accurate — placing him at a lowly 17th compared to other rodent forecasters.
Staten Island Chuck, a New York-based groundhog, tops the rankings with an impressive 85 percent accuracy rate on his forecasts.
Phil and his predecessors, also called Phil, have been forecasting since 1887.
