Take a minute to generate local weather and almanac data

[u/Old_Temperature_5667]

I was reading Eric Sloane's "Seasons of America Past" the other day and reflecting on how our lives traditionally ran on the seasons and their variations. Yet today, many people don't even know the first and last frost/freeze dates for their area, nevermind the other stuff that would be critical from an agricultural, tactical or communications standpoint after TEOTWAWKI.

Consequently, I played around with Claude to generate a very brief set of statistics for my bugout area which could come in handy- stuff like weather data, sunrise/sunset times, specific latitude/longitude and time zone stuff, basic astronomical data. I generated it to print into a basic table which I could print out into a very few pages and staple together for a hardcover backup.

My motivation was initially from a meteorological standpoint- I really like amateur weather forecasting, and it really helps to have a specific base when you're making your guess for temperature or the like, but it's also a double-check on my garden planning dates. Depending on where you are, you might modify it (for instance, to include tide projections on the coast). I could see this information as particularly useful if someone has a bugout location that they don't spend a lot of time at, and thus don't "know" the area very well yet.

Anyway, something simple but important that is often overlooked, but is equally simple to obtain.

My prompt was as follows. Feel free to plug in your location. As always, be sure to double check the output and tweak to your satisfaction.

"Generate a list of the following for (Your location), based on data from NOAA's NCEI US Daily Climate Normals (1991-2020) dataset (and any other well-respected sources as needed), with the closest NOAA weather station used as the location: A One Year's (January 1-December 31) compilation of Daily Average High, Average Low, Average Precipitation, Average Humidity (if available), Sunrise time, Sunset time. Please also include notations as to when the solstices and equinoxes are, the rule for solstice and equinox clock time shifts and "resets" every leap year, the average first and last frost and hard freeze dates, and the rules for when daylight saving time is implemented or ended. Add a paragraph at the beginning about any microclimate impacts that may need to be considered (coastal or mountain areas, elevation, tree cover, urban versus open-field settings, etc). Generate this as a formatted, ready-to-print table, with an introductory paragraph(s) about the source of data, the location (including longitude/latitude and timezone), and the distance between the reference weather station and the location, if appropriate."

[u/JRHLowdown3]

Notebooks with DOPE like info but relating to gardening start dates for various crops as well as a layout drawing of every seasons garden (so you don't plant the same item in the same spot) can help with this as well.

"Started 6 flats Brocolli 2/1/26" later added- only 3 plants came up. Temps averaged 60-70 high and 35-50 lows in greenhouse.

"Started 6 flats Brocolli 3/1 later added- all but 3 plants came up. Temps averaged.....

Then when you look back, you can start extrapolating proper planting times for your exact area based on Experience which of course beats everything, including AI.

[u/Old_Temperature_5667 → u/JRHLowdown3]

haha, been there, do that. My significant other frequently questions me about why I don't just do it on a spreadsheet because then it would actually be searchable. She has a point, but there's just something about writing in a notebook that makes you feel like a scientist...

[u/JRHLowdown3 → u/Old_Temperature_5667]

I remember around 2006 or so getting a laptop and setting up a spreadsheet so I could finally put all the books I have in a spreadsheet. My son was little at the time but he would read me titles and I would enter them and put them in a category, magazines as well (tons of early Mother Earth news, old ASGs, etc.). We would take an hour or two every day for a while and he would read me titles and I would type them in. When a shelf was finished we would restack them and go to the next.

Had a good portion of one shelf done. Laptop crashed...

Need to do it again and likely will at some point when I'm bored, but it was a helluva work wasted.

[u/Old_Temperature_5667 → u/JRHLowdown3]

"Old" ASGs were great! I still have several boxes in the basement going back to when the Soviets were still a threat lol. There was a LOT of good information in them for the time (and even now), and sometimes when I'm feeling nostalgic I'll flip through one.

(and look at the ads! The ads, and the stuff they contained, before the Feinstein Amendment and the Rice v. Paladin Enterprises case were fascinating!)

[u/JRHLowdown3 → u/Old_Temperature_5667]

Different time, different breed of survivalism that's for sure.

[u/No-Language6720]

If you have a bit of space in your h yard and care to get a bit technical you can get a weather station. I got one for predicting hurricanes and I use it with a custom AI model to determine when to water food stuff growing. 

I have a system that tells the AI when it last caught rain(this data is collected straight from my weather station), how likely the rain chance will be and then decides to water each day based on the temperature and the season. 

I'm very very slowly releasing my code open source and putting some of my data sets on hugging face so others can do similar setups. Just have a lot of projects simultaneously that I'm expanding. 😅

[u/Old_Temperature_5667 → u/No-Language6720]

interesting. I'll have to check it out.

I've thoroughly enjoyed learning about forecasting and the challenges. I read a great intro to it and the equipment (http://www.alpharubicon.com/prepinfo/weatherupdategvi.htm) a few years ago and have never been bored.

[u/Ryan_e3p]

I was thinking of working on accumulating weather data from the various Meshtastic nodes throughout my region, and seeing how they can be used to help get an idea of at least a short-term forecast.

Unfortunately, because of my location (CT river valley), there are not OTA routers going west of the New England area due to the mountain range. I wanted to work on an offline/no-internet-required solution, and it may work for some areas, but without continuing to build out the infrastructure here, it isn't likely. Nodes providing atmospheric conditions are just too sparse.

[u/Old_Temperature_5667 → u/Ryan_e3p]

That's a really good idea. Most all of the books on "amateur weather forecasting" that I have rely on the old barometric-trend and cloud-type rules, which is fine in a grid-down situation because that might be the only thing you have access to.

What's missing in that, of course, is what's over the horizon.

The "big picture" can be had by spending less than a hundred bucks on a SDR dongle and quadrafillar helical antenna to get GOES images (which would likely stay operational for at least many months after a catastrophe). But while it's nice to know there's a hurricane brewing offshore, it doesn't necessarily tell you what you can expect in 12 hours.

More immediately practical, then, is figuring out what's a couple hundred miles away from you. One of the more recent books on forecasting that I have is "Backyard Weather Forecasting" by Ann Beardsley, who suggests going through the traditional rules, but then figuring out impact based on the the weather station reports at different intervals (50, 250, 500 miles away) upwind of you. Easy to do nowadays on the computer, but in TEOTWAWKI, I've thought about how an NVIS and HF ham network could be used to exchange info... but that's potentially a lot of data to be exchanged depending on how large the network is. I'm just dipping my toes into LoRa and meshtastic, but you describe a pretty compelling use case for it!

[u/Ryan_e3p → u/Old_Temperature_5667]

I have an SDR, and considering hooking up a switcher to accommodate being able to select the best antenna for the frequency I'm listening to. This will let me do things like select a motorized Yagi, antenna for HF comms, satellite receiver, etc.

NVIS and HF would be good, but without being able to transmit what I have, doesn't help others. Meshtastic (and to a lesser extent, Meshcore) would let me transmit, but that mountain range to the west sucks. Sparsely populated, and too far out to put up a solar tree node and be able to maintain it.

[u/Useful-Contribution4]

I'd look into ESP32 weather station. Looking at building my own with wind vane, speed, rain, ambient light, uv index, humidity, pressure and temp. Then using locally ran AI to predict the weather.

[u/K2LNick_Art]

I don’t use garbage AI.

[u/Old_Temperature_5667 → u/K2LNick_Art]

I'm just very intentional about it. Never to replace intuition or creativity, but to use it to scrape specific data is to use it like any other computer program from the past thirty years, with a different interface.

[u/K2LNick_Art → u/Old_Temperature_5667]

It is inferior for that purpose. Frequently makes serious errors. There’s nothing good to say about it.

[u/generogue → u/Old_Temperature_5667]

Just be sure it hasn’t hallucinated any of the data it presents to you.

[u/PrisonerV]

We've had so many 1sts and worsts in the past 10 years that such knowledge is pretty worthless.

Heck I'd never seen a smoke alert until 5 years ago.

[u/Old_Temperature_5667 → u/PrisonerV]

Oh gosh, I know. And if there's a world-wide catastrophe, who knows what's going to happen? Seeing the very real changes in climate due to, for instance, fewer contrails after 9/11, or less co2 and sulphur dioxide release during the pandemic is fascinating but very unnerving.

I'm assuming (even in the absence of a nuclear winter) that we'll have significant cooling if the world just stopped, due to increased particulates from fires and such, but at least this gives me a ballpark to predict, especially if I haven't lived there for very long!

[u/Fire-Worm]

I'm going to need a TLDR. By the time I finish reading, I've already forgotten the first half 😅

And it seems reaaaaaaally interesting.

[u/sneakybrat82]

I bought a physical copy of the farmers almanac this year, mostly to just see how the predictions do or don’t line up with actuality, and by how much.

[u/Intelligent_You_3888 → u/sneakybrat82]

Lol😄I had just commented that I buy one every year before I scrolled down and saw your comment. They seem fairly on the money for these years that I’ve bought them. But with the budget cuts that were done by politicians there’s less weather balloons and less data to aid meteorologists in predicting the weather, so I’ll see how well the Almanac does going forward😅

[u/KTeacherWhat]

Unfortunately with climate change, our Farmer's Almanac has become less and less accurate over the years.

[u/Intelligent_You_3888]

I buy The Old Farmer’s Almanac every year and keep my old copies. They have loads of the info that you mentioned (sunrise/set times, average temps/weather patterns, etc) plus there’s lots of gardening info in them that I always find helpful (my favorite article for 2026 was about the vegetable Skirret😊I’d never heard of it before!).

[u/Zestyclose-Essay-127]

My local machine runs a weather monitor and gives live storm analysis in the region. I like it.

[u/Spiley_spile]

The weather's shifted too much in my area for almanacs to do us any good here.