Updated at 6:15 p.m. Wednesday: Revised with new information throughout.

A beastly cold season is on the way this winter, the Farmer's Almanac predicts, with "stinging cold" weather expected in Texas and exceptionally frosty conditions forecast from the Continental Divide east through the Appalachians.

The 2019 edition of the publication calls for "teeth-chattering" cold with an arctic cold front delivering above-average snowfall and lower-than-normal temperatures after the new year, especially in the Great Lakes and Midwest regions and parts of New England.

"Our time-tested long-range formula is pointing toward a very long, cold and snow-filled winter," said Farmer's Almanac editor Peter Geiger.

The annual publication relies on a century-old mathematical and astronomical formula — taking into account sunspot activity, planetary positions and other factors — for its long-range weather outlooks.

The almanac predicts a harsh winter for most of the country. (Farmer's Almanac)

Meteorologists caution that while they can predict a week to 10 days of Texas' notoriously fickle weather with some degree of accuracy, it's guesswork to forecast two weeks out — and long-range outlooks like those in the almanac are a crapshoot.

"The ability to predict events that far in advance is zero," Penn State climatologist Paul Knight says on the university's website. "There's no proven skill, there's no technique that's agreed upon in science to be able to do that."

Even so, the almanac said the brunt of the winter freeze is expected to hit in mid-February, mostly bedeviling the country's Northeast, Great Lakes, Ohio Valley, Midwest and Southeast regions.

The cold snap, the forecast says, will bring "blustery and bitter winds," plunging temperatures and wide-ranging squalls and snow showers, with stormy wintry conditions lingering along the East Coast even through spring's official start.

"Mid-March could be stormy virtually coast to coast," the almanac says. "In particular, we are red-flagging March 20-23 for a potent East Coast storm that could deliver a wide variety of wintry precipitation just as we are making the transition from winter to spring. So, no matter what the groundhog says in February, you'll know winter isn't going anywhere anytime soon."

While acknowledging the almanac's popularity, meteorologist Steve Fano of the National Weather Service in Fort Worth said it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to predict that far in the future because so many factors are involved.

"Even beyond seven days, any little errors you make just get magnified," Fano said. "The further out you try to project, the more errors you're going to have."

The weather service's own models project three months out at most, "and even those are pretty coarse," he said.

Currently those models call for normal precipitation levels through November with above-normal temperatures, echoing a national trend extending into the Pacific Northwest and up into Alaska.

But Fano said the weather service isn't yet seeing anything in the tea leaves of Pacific waters, including signs of El Nino or La Nina, that would indicate how winter will play out.

"Usually the setup of how warm the waters are out in the eastern Pacific will drive long-range patterns," he said. "But right now we are not seeing any strong signals that we will see exceptionally cold temperatures."