This podcast is part of the Big Heads Media Podcast Network.

Go to bigheadsmedia.com for more great podcasts. Hello and welcome back to the Curious Kid podcast.

Happy Groundhog Day.

For those of you that may not know what Groundhog Day is, it's the day when we learn whether spring will arrive early or whether winter will continue for another six weeks.

And we learn how much winter is left from a Groundhog. That's right. The Groundhog Day tradition goes back at least 180 years. There is a town in western

Pennsylvania with a pretty funny name. It's called Punksitani. That's the one. About 40,000 people have

been gathering in Punksitani every year on Groundhog Day to wait for a groundhog sighting.

That's a really big number since only about 5,000 people live in the town of Pung Satani all year round.

The groundhog's name is Pung Satani Phil.

And guess what? It's the groundhog named Punksitani Phil that decides the weather.

If he sees his shadow, there's going to be six more weeks of winter.

And if he doesn't see a shadow, spring will be here early.

You may be wondering how accurate a groundhog is in predicting the weather. It turns out it's not very accurate at all.

He less accurate than random chance.

That's right. Random chance is 50%. In other words, if you do something that has two possible outcomes, let's say flipping a coin, and you'd do it 100 times,

you would expect it to land on heads about 50 times and on tails about 50 times.

Well, the groundhog's accuracy is less than 50%.

A top meteorologist by the name of Tim Roche says the groundhog is only right 36% of the time,

which means only 36 out of 100 times.

The Storm Fax Almanac puts his accuracy at 39%, which is only slightly better.

Sorry to ruin Groundhog Day for you.

Yeah, it's a fun tradition, but don't get too caught up in what the Groundhog does today.

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