This Data Set Shows How Our Emotions Affect the Weather

We all know that the weather can affect your emotions, but can your emotions affect the weather? When I was 12 years old I started to notice a phenomenon whenever the school year started. No matter what the weather had been the week or day before that first day of school, that first day that school started it would be one or more of the following: cloudy, foggy, drizzling/raining.

To my young mind, I put forward to my friends the hypothesis that the collective depressive energy of tens of millions of kids was causing the weather to be as grey as we were feeling.Fast forward some decades: my son started school and I noticed a similar pattern. One year before school started, I mentioned my theory to my wife and she immediately dismissed the notion, but then it drizzled on that day. The next year I mentioned it to my son and he also thought it was crazy, but it happened again.  So he told his friends who also thought it was nuts, but then it happened again.Historically, school has started on the first day after Labor Day. This has been changing over the last 15 years through a variety of poorly thought-out government policies, but that’s another story.My current wife is a school teacher and her school started August 13th, while our kids didn’t start until August 25th. On August 24th, my wife and I were on our daily after-dinner walk and I was telling her my observation. It was about 90 degrees out still and not a cloud in the sky. She said that she had never once in all her teaching observed that weather pattern.The next day it was overcast all day and over 10 degrees cooler than what the weather channel was saying, even that morning.  Then around 10:30am it started to drizzle. Of course, I took a picture and texted it to her for fun, but it made me want to research this.

I went back and looked at the weather for the day she had started school (August 13th), and sure enough, it had mostly been clear and hot.  On the day when her students came back, it was overcast. This made me want to research it even more, so I covered my school years up through my first year of college (from 1968 to 1981!).

Then I picked it up again from when my oldest son started school in 2000 through the current year, because I have other kids in school now. I used the site  to look up the weather for each date and I pasted the line of data into a spreadsheet that you can see in the image below