Is August fog related to wintertime snowfall? Here’s what we found

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (KY3) - The old wives’ tale goes, “every foggy day in August corresponds to a day of snow in the Winter.”

It’s been followed by many believers to hold true. But what does the data show? We dug into the records of the last 20 years from the National Weather Service in Springfield to find out.

Regarding foggy days in August and snowy days in the wintertime, there are only a few years where the data lines up perfectly. 2010-2011, 2012-2013, and 2020-2021 are the only years that match this folklore’s rule. A handful of years come close, but most are far off.

We also compared the amount of snowfall and days of fog in August. These are two completely different variables, but we wanted to see if any part of this equation had a relationship. Some years trend with one another, but just like the previous example, it does not show much correlation.

To find a concrete answer, we would have to look at more than the last 20 years, but from this glance, it seems safe to say there’s little to no relation between August fog to wintertime snow.

First Alert Meteorologist Brandon Beck says this goes for a lot of weather lore.

“There might be a few years where it happens to match up. People say, ‘Aha! Told you,’ But most years, it has absolutely nothing to do with how much snow we get. It’s kind of like the wooly worms. People start sending us pictures of ones that are all black, ‘Oooh, supposed to be a bad winter,’ but we’ve had so many winters where we’ve gotten no snow or very little snow when the wooly worms said we were supposed to get really bad,” Beck explained.

So, we’ve had 11 days of fog in August. We’ll see if this winter holds true to this tall tale with 11 days of snowfall.

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