{"id":157967,"date":"2026-01-31T12:31:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-31T12:31:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/157967\/"},"modified":"2026-01-31T12:31:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-31T12:31:07","slug":"fresnos-first-groundhog-day-forecast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/157967\/","title":{"rendered":"Fresno&#8217;s first Groundhog Day forecast!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Remember back last Summer, when the Fresno-Chaffee zoo adopted Maple the groundhog from a zoo in Oregon? She made her Fresno debut, there was a contest to name her, and Maple has been a little quiet ever since.<\/p>\n<p>Well, now we&#8217;re turning the calendar from a very foggy January to FOGUARY, and it&#8217;s Maple&#8217;s time to shine once again! Groundhog Day is Monday, and she&#8217;s got a forecast to make. If she sees her shadow Monday morning, old folklore says that we&#8217;ll have 6 more weeks of winter. This Winter, it seems like it would just be 6 more weeks of fog, but I digress. If she does not see her shadow, that would mean an early start to Spring, and that&#8217;s the heavy betting favorite in the Fox 26 Weather Center. Unless they let her sleep in late.<\/p>\n<p>There certainly hasn&#8217;t been a lot of variety in our weather lately. We start the morning off thick fog in the Valley&#8230; which burns off to hazy sunshine by the afternoon. Fog re-forms in the Valley overnight, and that&#8217;s the pattern. For the past 3+ weeks, and it won&#8217;t change through the first week of Foguary. Long range models are hinting at rain beyond that, but they&#8217;ve been doing that for a couple of weeks now. I&#8217;ll believe it when I see it.<\/p>\n<p>Just looking at climatology, our fog should be done soon after that. We average 5 days of dense fog (where Visibility drop to 1\/4 mile or below) at Fresno-Yosemite International airport in November, 11 in both December and January, 5 in February, and a little over 1 in March&#8230; a classic Bell Curve. We&#8217;ve had 31 days of dense fog at Fresno-Yosemite this season, and many more where the Visibility was only slightly better. We average 5 dense fog days in February and 1 in March. If we stick to average fog the rest of the season, we&#8217;ll finish at 37 days of dense fog this season, which would be our foggiest season in 23 years. The winter of 2002-2003 saw 40 dense fog days.<\/p>\n<p>What started out as a wet winter has transformed into a foggy one, but we&#8217;re not done yet. For what&#8217;s ahead, we&#8217;ll need to consult with one of the newest ambassadors at the Fresno-Chaffee zoo&#8230; Maple the Groundhong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Remember back last Summer, when the Fresno-Chaffee zoo adopted Maple the groundhog from a zoo in Oregon? She&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":157968,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[112,114,113],"class_list":{"0":"post-157967","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fresno","8":"tag-fresno","9":"tag-fresno-headlines","10":"tag-fresno-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157967\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/157968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}