For April-June, we see continued forecasts for warm and dry weather. Forecasted search interest is slightly higher from last year with forecasts similar to last month. However, it’s important to note that the Upper Peninsula achieved far lower search interest during March than expected. Seasonal trends for the Upper Peninsula seem more similar to pre-2020 trends than post-2020. This winter was warm and relatively snow free providing few opportunities for winter sports. This provides evidence of nonlinear relationships that sometimes occur between weather patterns and search interest. Small differences may have negligible or reverse impact, but this year was not a small difference from previous experiences.

Hopefully, this is a one-off change for the Upper Peninsula. However, if very warm weather occurs more frequently, it might not be.

Last month I also brought up the fact that Google trends data changes from data pull to data pull even for the same time period. As we can see below, this issue continues especially for the Lower Peninsula and especially for winter and early spring months.