It is a well known fact that weather can influence various aspects of our everyday lives, including physical and mental health, productivity, performance, social behavior, etc. Sometimes, the connection is direct and obvious. For instance, extreme temperature fluctuations have been shown to affect our immune systems, and the quality of air is directly linked to asthma and allergies. More than often, however, the weather effects are peculiar and more subtle. The heat, for example, has been linked to aggression and violence. Certain kinds of wind has been shown to negatively affect human behavior and psyche (e.g., the foehn in Swiss Alps, or khamsin in Middle East). A lot of people (including myself) report sleeping better at nights when it rains or snows. I personally tend to experience mild depression on cloudy and rainy days, while plenty of sunshine usually affects my mood positively. Naturally, the only way to see if any particular weather aspect actually affects your life, and to what extent would be to include it in your self-tracking routine, and then analyze the hypothesized patterns. So for the past couple of weeks I have been looking for a way to incorporate weather data into my tracking logs, and in today’s post, would like to share my current findings and potential quantified-self research ideas.
The ideal tool or source for weather tracking, in my opinion, should meet the following criteria:
It will have less details (only temperature, humidity, pressure, wind direction/speed, and precipitation). The same History Data tool can be used to download daily data in comma-separated-values format for the past week, month, or a given period. You may also look into local alternatives to Wunderground. For exampe, if you live in New York, you may check out http://www.cnyweather.com/wxtempdetail.php. It covers less data points (temperature, barometric pressure, precipitation, wind speed, sunshine hours), but data is presented in a table which can be easily copied and pasted into Excel. How can you use this information? That would depend on your research hypotheses about which weather aspects may affect your physiological or mental state. In my case, the variables of interest are air quality, barometric pressure, clouds and precipitation, and perhaps, temperature. The air quality affects my allergies (I would like to find out to which extent) and cloudiness and precipitation may affect my mood. I also suspect that changes in barometric pressure cause headaches. I am not sure about the temperature, but it would be interesting to see if the temperature fluctuations have any effect on my daily routines. Some of these readings can be recorded only once, whereas other will have to be tracked depending on time of the day and location. In particular, air quality readings (pollen and PM2.5) should stay the same throughout the day, regardless of my work/home location (I live in the upper part and work in the lower part of Manhattan). The cloud cover, precipitation, temperature and barometric pressure will need be recorded in the morning, afternoon, and evening. I already started including weather data into my tracking logs next month, and will keep you posted on my progress PS I am currently looking into Netatmo personal weather staton that measures environment both indoors and outdoors, as well as its cheaper alternatives. You can check the review at Compact Analysis
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