Abstract
This study explores the effects that the weather has on people's everyday activity patterns. Temperature, rainfall, and wind speed were used as weather parameters. People's daily activity patterns were inferred, such as place visited, the time this took place, the duration of the visit, based on the GPS location traces of their mobile phones overlaid upon Yellow Pages information. Our analysis of 31,855 mobile phone users allowed us to infer that people were more likely to stay longer at eateries or food outlets, and (to a lesser degree) at retail or shopping areas when the weather is very cold or when conditions are calm (non-windy). When compared to people's regular activity patterns, certain weather conditions affected people's movements and activities noticeably at different times of the day. On cold days, people's activities were found to be more diverse especially after 10AM, showing greatest variations between 2PM and 6PM. A similar trend is observed between 10AM and midnight on rainy days, with people's activities found to be most diverse on days with heaviest rainfalls or on days when the wind speed was stronger than 4 km/h, especially between 10AM–1AM. Finally, we observed that different geographical areas of a large metropolis were impacted differently by the weather. Using data of urban infrastructure to characterize areas, we found strong correlations between weather conditions upon people's accessibility to trains. This study sheds new light on the influence of weather conditions on human behavior, in particular the choice of daily activities and how mobile phone data can be used to investigate the influence of environmental factors on urban dynamics.
Highlights
People habitually carry their mobile phones with them much of the time as this pervasive technology offers its users a means for constant and available communication as well as personal entertainment
Certain weather parameters depend upon others, we considered the effects of each weather parameter separately on people’s mobility and activity patterns in this study
With the activity pattern inferred in the same way as described earlier for each band of each weather parameter, the results show that different weather conditions do have an influence on people’s activity patterns throughout the day
Summary
People habitually carry their mobile phones with them much of the time as this pervasive technology offers its users a means for constant and available communication as well as personal entertainment. Along with the logs of incoming and outgoing calls, telecom operators can capture people’s phones movement, as the phone move through the ubiquitous network of towers. This transforms the phone into individual life loggers, giving longitudinal records of personal mobility while offering unprecedented fine-grained data at the aggregate level. This can give researchers a glimpse of various dimensions of human life. For example using mobile phones to study social structure [1], how an individual’s diversity of social network can lead to greater personal economic development [2], and how weather affects people’s use of phone calls to connect with others [3]
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