Statistical analysis of relationships between road accidents involving personal injury and meteorological variables in Hungary

Public opinion and certain human meteorological communications assume close relationship between meteorological variations and human conditions, especially the development of traffic accidents. This paper presents a detailed statistical analysis between domestic road accidents involving personal injury and relevant meteorological conditions for the period of 1990-2010 in Hungary. Approximately 431 thousand accidents were analyzed based on official statistical data. In general, a significant but weak interrelation was found between the absolute change - calculated from the previous day - of road traffic accidents involving personal injury and meteorological conditions. The results of multivariate linear regression analysis show that meteorological variations affected only nearly four percent of the variation of accidents relative to traffic. We demonstrated, however, that together with the significant variation of certain meteorological parameters, the number of accidents also significantly varies. Days with extreme meteorological variations explain the development of accidents in 9.8 percent, while in the case of days with non-extreme variations, this value was only 2.6 percent.