Weather impacts expressed sentiment

TL;DR

This study analyzes over three billion social media posts to reveal how various weather conditions influence human sentiment, showing that extreme weather generally correlates with more negative expressions.

Contribution

It provides the largest empirical investigation into weather's impact on sentiment, quantifying effects across multiple meteorological variables using extensive social media data.

Findings

Extreme temperatures and weather conditions are linked to worsened sentiment.

Weather effects are comparable in magnitude to notable historical events.

Negative sentiment increases with temperature extremes, humidity, and cloud cover.

Abstract

We conduct the largest ever investigation into the relationship between meteorological conditions and the sentiment of human expressions. To do this, we employ over three and a half billion social media posts from tens of millions of individuals from both Facebook and Twitter between 2009 and 2016. We find that cold temperatures, hot temperatures, precipitation, narrower daily temperature ranges, humidity, and cloud cover are all associated with worsened expressions of sentiment, even when excluding weather-related posts. We compare the magnitude of our estimates with the effect sizes associated with notable historical events occurring within our data.