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Using social media data to understand and assess disasters

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Abstract

This paper contributes to the understanding of disasters from the perspective of social media activities. We develop a measure based on Twitter activities that can be used to quantify the evolution of disasters and thus demonstrate temporal–spatial patterns of Twitter activities particularly near the coastline and in large urban areas during Hurricane Sandy. We also show a close relationship between hurricane damages and Twitter activities. Our findings suggest the potential of using social media activities for rapid damage assessment.

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Notes

  1. This is for twitter API version 1.0. For the latest search API connection address, please visit https://dev.twitter.com/ for details.

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Acknowledgments

Funding for this project from the National Science Foundation (CMMI-1200275) is greatly appreciated. We thank Douglas Bausch at Federal Emergency Management Agency for providing a key data source on Sandy-related damages and Dorothy Reed at the University of Washington for providing us with the power outage data. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

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  1. Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98195, USA

    Xiangyang Guan & Cynthia Chen

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  1. Xiangyang Guan
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  2. Cynthia Chen
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Correspondence to Xiangyang Guan.

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Guan, X., Chen, C. Using social media data to understand and assess disasters. Nat Hazards 74, 837–850 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-014-1217-1

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