Southern Manitoba will officially usher in Autumn on Friday at 3:02 pm. And, according to The Old Farmer's Almanac, the season will start cooler and drier than normal.

Jack Burnett is Managing Editor of The Old Farmer's Almanac. He says both September and October are expected to be slightly cooler than normal and a little bit drier for this part of the province.

The trend is a little different for winter in southern Manitoba. Burnett says they are calling for temperatures to be about half a degree warmer than normal throughout the entire winter. He adds the coldest stretches of winter are expected to be the first week of December, the first week of January and the first week of February.

As for precipitation, he says it appears our winter won't have quite as much snow as what normally falls here. The snowiest periods are expected to be the last half of November and mid-March.

"It looks just kind of like a standard Manitoba winter," says Burnett. "Ever so slightly warmer than normal and ever so slightly drier than normal but nothing to worry about in either case."

In terms of blizzards for the 2017-2018 winter, Burnett says it doesn't appear like we will see any storms large enough to be categorized as a blizzard.

When it comes to making forecasts, Burnett says they rely on a recipe that was first used by Robert B. Thomas in the 1790's. Burnett says when Thomas first started making weather forecasts in 1792 he took three things into consideration. The first factor is meteorology, which is the localized weather phenomenon that is caused by factors such as mountains, lakes or localized winds.

The second factor is climatology, which is long-term weather patterns for a particular area. Burnett says today we have weather data dating back decades, while Thomas would have relied on letters sent from people describing the weather in their neck of the woods.

And the third factor is solar science. Burnett says Thomas was one of the first weather prognosticators to think that solar radiation might have something to do with our weather.

Burnett says through the use of computers, they can find a pattern in history where the weather trends then resemble patterns today. Then, by learning what happened next in history, they can determine what is most likely to happen in our future.

And even though the summer of 2017 isn't officially over, Burnett says The Old Farmer's Almanac has already come up with a forecast for next spring and even summer. The spring of 2018 is expected to be slightly cooler and wetter than normal for southern Manitoba, while summer should be warmer and slightly drier than normal.