Humanitarian organizations have a crucial role in response and relief efforts after floods. The effectiveness of disaster response is contingent on accurate and timely information regarding the location, timing and impacts of the event. Here we show how two near-real-time data sources, satellite observations of water coverage and flood-related social media activity from Twitter, can be used to support rapid disaster response, using case-studies in the Philippines and Pakistan. For these countries we analyze information from disaster response organizations, the Global Flood Detection System (GFDS) satellite flood signal, and flood-related Twitter activity analysis. The results demonstrate that these sources of near-real-time information can be used to gain a quicker understanding of the location, the timing, as well as the causes and impacts of floods. In terms of location, we produce daily impact maps based on both satellite information and social media, which can dynamically and rapidly outline the affected area during a disaster. In terms of timing, the results show that GFDS and/or Twitter signals flagging ongoing or upcoming flooding are regularly available one to several days before the event was reported to humanitarian organizations. 2247In terms of event understanding, we show that both GFDS and social media can be used to detect and understand unexpected or controversial flood events, for example due to the sudden opening of hydropower dams or the breaching of flood protection. The performance of the GFDS and Twitter data for early detection and location mapping is mixed, depending on specific hydrological circumstances (GFDS) and social media penetration (Twitter). Further research is needed to improve the interpretation of the GFDS signal in different situations, and to improve the pre-processing of social media data for operational use.
Early event detection and response can significantly reduce the societal impact of floods. Currently, early warning systems rely on gauges, radar data, models and informal local sources. However, the scope and reliability of these systems are limited. Recently, the use of social media for detecting disasters has shown promising results, especially for earthquakes. Here, we present a new database for detecting floods in real-time on a global scale using Twitter. The method was developed using 88 million tweets, from which we derived over 10,000 flood events (i.e., flooding occurring in a country or first order administrative subdivision) across 176 countries in 11 languages in just over four years. Using strict parameters, validation shows that approximately 90% of the events were correctly detected. In countries where the first official language is included, our algorithm detected 63% of events in NatCatSERVICE disaster database at admin 1 level. Moreover, a large number of flood events not included in NatCatSERVICE were detected. All results are publicly available on www.globalfloodmonitor.org.
Abstract. The increasing number and severity of floods, driven by phenomena such as urbanization, deforestation, subsidence and climate change, create a growing need for accurate and timely flood maps. In this paper we present and evaluate a method to create deterministic and probabilistic flood maps from Twitter messages that mention locations of flooding. A deterministic flood map created for the December 2015 flood in the city of York (UK) showed good performance (F (2) = 0.69; a statistic ranging from 0 to 1, with 1 expressing a perfect fit with validation data). The probabilistic flood maps we created showed that, in the York case study, the uncertainty in flood extent was mainly induced by errors in the precise locations of flood observations as derived from Twitter data. Errors in the terrain elevation data or in the parameters of the applied algorithm contributed less to flood extent uncertainty. Although these maps tended to overestimate the actual probability of flooding, they gave a reasonable representation of flood extent uncertainty in the area. This study illustrates that inherently uncertain data from social media can be used to derive information about flooding.
Timely and accurate information about ongoing events are crucial for relief organizations seeking to effectively respond to disasters. Recently, social media platforms, especially Twitter, have gained traction as a novel source of information on disaster events. Unfortunately, geographical information is rarely attached to tweets, which hinders the use of Twitter for geographical applications. As a solution, geoparsing algorithms extract and can locate geographical locations referenced in a tweet's text. This paper describes TAGGS, a new algorithm that enhances location disambiguation by employing both metadata and the contextual spatial information of groups of tweets referencing the same location regarding a specific disaster type. Validation demonstrated that TAGGS approximately attains a recall of 0.82 and precision of 0.91. Without lowering precision, this roughly doubles the number of correctly found administrative subdivisions and cities, towns, and villages as compared to individual geoparsing. We applied TAGGS to 55.1 million flood-related tweets in 12 languages, collected over 3 years. We found 19.2 million tweets mentioning one or more flood locations, which can be towns (11.2 million), administrative subdivisions (5.1 million), or countries (4.6 million). In the future, TAGGS could form the basis for a global event detection system.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.