By Daniel Hartill,Staff Writer

LEWISTON – As the snow fell Thursday, Peter Geiger watched the Weather Channel and said quietly, “Told you so.”

The editor of the Farmers’ Almanac predicted this storm two years ago.

By 9 a.m., he had received calls to his Lewiston office from as far away as Boston and rebuffed questions about his secret weather formula. “We do our best,” he said. “Most of the time, we’re pretty close.”

However, this forecast was as close as it gets.

In the almanac’s 2005 edition – published last August – Geiger predicted that a storm would hit the Northeast between Feb. 8 and 11, delivering blizzard conditions and 1 to 2 feet of snow.

“We really hit the major storm,” he said. “The guys on TV were updating their forecast every 12 hours.”

Of course, its predictions aren’t always so successful. For the earlier part of February, the almanac predicted cold for the region, yet Maine set record highs then.

“Temperatures are the toughest to predict,” said Geiger, who says he’s right 75 to 85 percent of the time.

The almanac predicts the weather using a secret formula that’s been passed down for 187 years, according to Geiger. He has already begun forecasting the weather for 2007.

“I have 2006 in the bag,” he said.

Even after a forecast is published, he continues to check it against what the meteorologists say, and what really happens.

He likes weather because “it’s always there,” said the man who keeps a TV in his office tuned to the Weather Channel most of the time.

“I’m a weatherholic,” he admits.