Having moved 3 years ago from London to Hong Kong, one of the things I’ve really enjoyed (apart from the food of course!) is the warm weather.

However, during the recent cold snap here in Hong Kong I found myself regularly checking the HK Observatory website to check how long it would last. Although my family & friends back in England would probably question whether 10 degrees Celsius actually constitutes cold weather, it made me wonder how the weather affects which sites we visit in Hong Kong.

To get some answers to this question I pulled together some data for the last 3 years from Experian Hitwise HK and matched it to weather data for the same period from the Hong Kong Observatory.

Experian Hitwise includes a standardised categorisation for websites that allowed me to easily see the Visit share (i.e. how likely people are to visit sites in each category) for each day for 16 broad categories and 116 sub-categories.

I then ran some quick correlation tests against daily temperature, cloud cover and rainfall data to see whether and how much the likelihood of people to visit sites in each category are correlated with the weather on the same day.

Not surprisingly, Visits to sites in the Weather category were correlated with the temperature, cloud cover and rainfall recorded on the day: like me, the average person in Hong Kong is more likely to visit weather sites when the weather is bad. However, there is a far stronger correlation between the amount of rainfall and visits to the weather category than for temperature and cloud cover – it seems I’m being more sensitive to the cold than most!

Apart from visits to weather-related sites there were some other interesting correlations:

• People are more likely to visit Movies & Community sites when the weather is colder vs. Travel, Television and Restaurant sites when it gets warm;
• When it’s cloudy and grey people are more likely to visit Search & Social Networking sites, whereas when the skies clear people are more inclined to seek out Food and Shopping sites;
• Apart from weather sites, heavy rain is also particularly likely to see increased visits to Aviation websites.

I’ve also summarised the largest correlations seen in the analysis in the charts below: