I don’t remember how I stumbled upon it, but I recently discovered Climatune, a joint effort between Spotify and Accuweather that presents a playlist to match the current weather. According to Accuweather’s blog post on the topic, the playlists were developed based on an analysis of 85 million streams across 900 cities. This is an incredibly interesting project, even if the Lafayette playlists don’t seem to vary much.

What I like about projects such as Climatune is the reminder that we are still animals affected by our surroundings. When I worked at McDonald’s, we noticed anecdotally that sales of the Filet-o-Fish apparently increased on rainy days. I regret that I never ran daily sales reports to test this observation. I suppose in either case, there was an effect. Either customers ordered more, or we were more aware of the sales.

Correlating weather with other data is hardly a new concept. The most common example is probably comparing Chicago crime reports to the temperature. But researchers have investigated mood-weather correlation from Twitter posts. Several studies have examined the effects of weather on the stock market.

These sorts of studies can be hard, since it’s hard to control for all of the possible factors. But even if we can’t draw statistically sound conclusions, it’s fun to look at the connections. And if weather isn’t your thing, Spotify also has a site that makes a custom playlist that fits the cook time of your Thanksgiving turkey.