Weather and Art
In 1970, Penn State meteorologist Hans Neuberger examined 12,000 European paintings to reconstruct climate data stretching from 1400 to 1967. He found a marked rise in cloud cover and darkness between 1550 and 1849, roughly matching the Little Ice Age. Mediterranean painters kept giving their skies blue clarity throughout; their British counterparts increasingly didn't — no English painting in his sample showed a fully clear sky.
In 2011, researchers Karen Aplin and Paul Williams ran the same idea on music instead of paint, tallying weather references in orchestral scores across history. Storms came up most often, then wind, cloud, rain, sun, and fog — and every storm passage they found was written in a minor key, every fair-weather passage in a major one.
Based on a post on Futility Closet.