2016 Old Farmer's Almanac: Winter Weather Forecast And A Digital Evolution

The 2016 Old Farmer's Almanac has just been published and -- despite competition from websites that have created empires from content shared on social media -- the venerable publication is more widely read than at any time in its history. Here's why.

First published in 1792, the Old Farmer's Almanac may seem an unlikely candidate to survive in 2015. But the guide's success in the Internet age turns out to be that it's been sharing social content since long before millennials ever started to tweet or post on Facebook.

The centerpiece of the Old Farmer's Almanac is its winter weather forecast, which naturally has sparked a backlash from professional meteorologists. But faulty information or inaccurate findings haven't kept the almanac from finding an audience of some 10 million monthly visitors to its website. Along with the weather forecast, the almanac throws in gardening tips ("Planting by the Moon"), a recipe for curried apricot and peppercorn chutney plus such minutiae as how deep a moose can dive.

Despite being 223 years old, the almanac is more like BuzzFeed or Upworthy than you would expect.

The almanac has more than 1 million Facebook fans, 15,0000 Twitter followers and 18,000 followers on Pinterest. Each Facebook post has at least a few hundred likes, and it has name recognition thanks to its history and publications such as the Old Farmer's Almanac for Kids. Brand recognition and readers cross all ages and regions, and the Old Farmer's Almanac's homepage popularity surpasses the physical numbers.

"We get more than 10 million monthly visitors. We probably have more people reading the site than the print edition," Sarah Perreault, Old Farmer's Almanac senior editor, told International Business Times. "It's full of all the same information, whether it's today's weather or moon phases. There are recipes and we get gardening questions from around the world. Although we are considered old-fashioned, we're really keeping up with technology."

Despite claims that the 2015 Old Farmer's Almanac's winter weather predictions were 96.3 percent accurate, many meteorologists and outlets say any forecast should be taken with a grain of salt. Many meteorologists liken the almanac's forecast to getting your palm read from a psychic, according to the Washington Post's roundup of coverage.

"We're really good at the day of and the next day, [and] we're better at temperature a ways out than precipitation. But to forecast out that far in advance ... even the science behind our long-range forecasting is sometimes not that solid," Dave Hennen, senior meteorologist and executive producer for CNN Weather, said.

Here's what the almanac is saying about the upcoming winter. Virtually no part of the U.S. is safe from the cold weather, and residents of the East Coast, the Pacific Northwest and the Southeast should be prepared to bundle up. There's also going to be plenty of snow for the Northeast, the Pacific Northwest and the Ohio Valley. If you're looking for some type of escape, Texas, Florida, Idaho, Utah, Oregon and Oklahoma will experience mild and dry weather. Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi will experience normal and dry weather, according to the almanac.

"A lot of people don't know we work with a meteorologist. It's not just the almanac's editors sitting in the office trying to figure out what we want the weather to be," said Perreault. "Our meteorologist uses the same formula that we've been using since 1792 and based on solar science, meteorology and climatology. We've come a long way since the first almanac and there's a lot more data, radar and scientific calculations in the formula."

Perreault also said New England will be cold and snowy, but Boston won't quite experience the record-breaking snowfall it had last year. "We did predict they would get above average snow, but we had no idea it would be that above normal," Perreault said regarding Boston's snowfall.