Currently, Northern Michigan has entered a normal winter with high temps near or usually below freezing and continued snow accumulation. Virtually all of Northern Michigan has been completely covered in snow since before Christmas. January search interest for the Upper Peninsula was similar to last year despite weather more favorable to winter recreation. It’s fair to believe that due to the downward trend in search interest investigated last year, that search interest would have been considerably lower if we had another winter drought like last year. Northern Lower search interest was somewhat lower than last year. The downward trend for Northern Lower search interest has not been as pronounced; however, Northern Lower search interest is not as responsive to winter recreation.

In response to the continued below forecast results, I have made adjustments to my forecasting model. First, I previously had an average trend built into the place level forecasts. Since the current trend does not meet the long-term average, I removed this trend. Furthermore, I added an adjustment to the place level forecasts based on the trend from the previous 12 months. It’s impossible to know what future trends in search interest will be and to what extent search interest will continue to decline. However, this new method will be much more responsive to recent observations which should greatly enhance the relatively short-term three-month forecasts produced by this project.

Finally, I will soon address the problems with the Google trends data pulls that I discussed last year. Each pull from Google trends is at least slightly different from the last. Over the past six months, this issue appeared to have mitigated, but deviations from the most recent two pulls for the Upper Peninsula were the worst I’ve encountered yet.