Buys Ballot tested the Doppler effect for sound waves in 1845 by using a group of musicians playing a calibrated note on a train in the Utrecht-Amsterdam line.

Buys Ballot is best known for his accomplishments in the field of meteorology, specifically the explanation of the direction of air flow in large weather systems.

Buys Ballot's law states that if a person in the Northern Hemisphere stands with his back to the wind, the atmospheric pressure is low to the left, high to the right.

The contrast with his American contemporary, William Ferrel, who discovered Buys-Ballot's law slightly earlier, is striking.

In 1847 he used the table now named after him to determine the period of the sun's rotation from daily observations of temperature in the Netherlands from 1729 to 1846.