SASKATOON – Farmers and commodity traders will be watching the Aug. 28 full moon with fear and expectation.
But while prairie folklore holds “full moon, frost soon,” farmers and grain traders should relax, according to Environment Canada’s senior weather officer.
“The one about the full moon and a frost has lived on for centuries, but really, I wouldn’t want to bet on it,” said David Phillips. “There are almost as many frosts in any one phase as in any other.”
Phillips said many people fervently believe a full moon brings frost, but if they want to find out for sure they should start charting when frosts occur and they’ll soon see there is no correlation between the pie in the sky and frost on the ground.
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Commodity traders and analysts know that meteorologists say the moon and frost don’t have anything to do with each other, but the moon still gets factored into trading, said PCT Services trader Steve Bloss.
“It certainly does” affect the markets, said Bloss. It’s not that traders are a superstitious lot, but they tend to take farmers’ concerns seriously, he said.
“I spent a lot of years in a grain elevator, and you’ve got to respect the fact that the old timers have been around a long time and they’ve seen frosts around the full moon,” Bloss said.
But he has also heard a piece of good meteorological news from American sources that studied weather patterns and have noticed that July weather and September weather tend to be linked: A cool July is generally followed by a warm September.
Since this year produced a cool July in the U.S. Midwest, the prediction is for a warm fall, Bloss said.
The Americans think the inverse relationship of July and September conditions comes from predictable variations in the jet stream, he said.
On the matter of the full moon, Phillips said people tend to notice it more than other moons because it is brighter. People then attribute characteristics to it that have no real basis.
But Phillips said there is a nugget of truth in farmers’ fears about the moon and frost.
“Clear moon, frost soon,” is more accurate, he said. If you can actually see any phase of the moon clearly in the night sky, that probably means there is no cloud cover. Without clouds the temperature drops quickly as the heat from the earth flees upward, and the risk of frost increases.
