by Calculated Risk on 2/22/2010 08:32:00 PM

Floyd Norris writes at the NY Times: Horrid Job Number Coming

It snowed this month in much of the United States. ... Both the household survey (which produces the unemployment rate) and the employer survey (which produces the job count) ask about workers in the week during which the 12th of the month fell [the week of the blizzards].
...
That means that a lot of people who had jobs may report they did not work during the week, and companies may say they had fewer people on the payroll than they would have cited a week earlier or later. If so, we may get a truly horrid job number.

Apparently the weather negatively impacted the jobs report in January 1996, and net employment turned negative for one month in the middle of a huge job boom.

Maybe the snow storms will impact the BLS report in February. Maybe not. ADP also uses payroll employment on the 12th of the month, so they should also be impacted.

Perhaps we will be able to tell if the weather had an impact by looking at weekly initial unemployment claims and the ISM reports (monthly surveys). Just something to remember next week ...