Nowcasting Disaster Damage
arXiv:1504.06827
Abstract
Could social media data aid in disaster response and damage assessment? Countries face both an increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters due to climate change. And during such events, citizens are turning to social media platforms for disaster-related communication and information. Social media improves situational awareness, facilitates dissemination of emergency information, enables early warning systems, and helps coordinate relief efforts. Additionally, spatiotemporal distribution of disaster-related messages helps with real-time monitoring and assessment of the disaster itself. Here we present a multiscale analysis of Twitter activity before, during, and after Hurricane Sandy. We examine the online response of 50 metropolitan areas of the United States and find a strong relationship between proximity to Sandy's path and hurricane-related social media activity. We show that real and perceived threats -- together with the physical disaster effects -- are directly observable through the intensity and composition of Twitter's message stream. We demonstrate that per-capita Twitter activity strongly correlates with the per-capita economic damage inflicted by the hurricane. Our findings suggest that massive online social networks can be used for rapid assessment ("nowcasting") of damage caused by a large-scale disaster.
References in corpus (6)
- The Digital Evolution of Occupy Wall Street
- Quantifying Human Mobility Perturbation and Resilience in Natural Disasters
- Social media fingerprints of unemployment
- Modeling the adoption of innovations in the presence of geographic and media influences
- The Geospatial Characteristics of a Social Movement Communication Network
- Performance of Social Network Sensors During Hurricane Sandy