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Oak Creek — It's going to be a mild winter, or so says Oak Creek resident Jean Paul Caouette, aka Jean the Weatherman.

From 4 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day, Jean the Weatherman checks the sky and trees, Weather Channel, Internet or watches weather tapes dating back to the '70s.

"He lives and breathes weather," Caouette's friend John Ives said.

"I take forecasting really seriously," he said. "It's not work, it's me."

After sorting through all the information, he makes a prediction and updates numerous weatherboards he keeps all over Oak Creek. Out of this Atmosphere weather boards hang at The Colorado Bar, Sinclair station, Chelsea's Restaurant, Big Tuna's Restaurant, Pisa's Restaurant, at the senior citizen apartments, Town Hall, post office and the Laundromat.

He updates them "as necessary," he said.

"I go on hunches sometimes and 90 percent of the time they're right," he said. "Sometimes I surprise myself."

The way he knows this will be a mild winter, he said, was checking the buds on the trees. They form shields at the beginning of the winter to protect against the cold, he said. Last year, the buds had five layers of shielding. This year they have only two, he said.

He also consulted history.

"Weather repeats itself in cycles," he said. He has tapes of jet stream patterns from the 1970s and military weather maps, once belonging to his grandfather, dating back to the early 1800s.

"This weather cycle that we are in right now is similar to what we saw in 1987," he said. "Not exactly the same, but similar."

Caouette has been watching the weather for as long as he can remember. He grew up in West Springfield, Mass., in an Iroquois Mohawk family.

His grandfather moved off the New York reservation to start a turkey farm but still took time to teach his grandson how to catch fish with his hand or a spear, how to throw a tomahawk or a knife and what to look for in the woods.

Now, Caouette watches everything comets, volcano eruptions halfway across the globe and earthquakes.

"Everything in the universe is connected," he said. But when he was a kid, his main fascination was with sunsets and sunrises.

"I always got up early," he said. "I started to notice that sunrises were about four or five different colors."

There is a saying, "Red in the morning, sailor's warning. Red at night, sailor's delight," that predicts the weather, but "I noticed there are different shades of red," Caouette said.

Caouette never went to college to study meteorology but began serious study of the subject when he was drafted into the Navy during the Vietnam War. He was assigned to the USS Enterprise, he said. He would walk the deck and watch the sky, then talk to the guys in the watchtowers.

"Every time I said something (about the weather) it would work out," he said.

Caouette moved to Routt County in 1989. At first, no one took his weather forecasts seriously, he said.

Not until January 1995.

"I'd been telling people the weather, but no one was paying attention," he said. "Then one day I was scanning the Pineapple Express, a moisture plume out of Hawaii. It was abnormally wide and coming straight for us. I had to tell somebody."

So Caouette ran to the Veterans of Foreign Wars bar.

"It was 5 p.m. and the bar was full," he said. "I told people it was going to snow for two to three weeks. The guy I told started laughing and announced it to the whole bar."

Caouette told the guy, "In a few days, you'll be asking me when it's going to stop." And he left the bar.

After the first week of shoveling foot after foot of snow, "that same guy came up to me and asked, 'When is it going to stop?'" Caouette said.

By Jan. 24, there was 16 feet of snow on the ground.

"Now people come up to me all the time and ask about the weather," Caouette said.

"He convinced me," Town Clerk Nancy Crawford said. "He's pretty darn accurate and I look forward to his forecasts. I have a lot of faith in him."

This year, Caouette printed up 6,500 long-range forecasts for the winter and gave them out around town and mailed them to family and friends all over the country.

"I feel like it's my job to tell people what the weather is going to do to their life that day," he said.