Early detection and information extraction for weather-induced floods using social media streams

Abstract

surface temperature is projected to rise throughout the 21st century under all assessed emission scenarios [2]. Such global warming directly affects precipitations because the water holding capacity of air increases by about 7% per degree C [3] that leads to more water vapor being retained in the atmosphere. Storms, thunderstorms, extra-tropical rains, snow, are therefore supplied with more moisture and produce more extreme precipitation events. Such events are observed to be widely occurring, even where total precipitation is decreasing, and, in combination with rapid snow melting, they increases the risk of flooding. Given that floods are usually weather-induced, meteorological services provide local authorities with a periodical weather and flood hazard forecast that contains an encoded alert level on a predetermined set of geographical areas. The alert level is used to trigger actions according to a predefined

Social weather: A review of crowdsourcing‐assisted meteorological knowledge services through social cyberspace

“…Temperature, pressure and light intensity collected by huge crowds of smart phone owners tagged with high‐precision GPS depict an exquisite map (Overeem et al , ; Sosko & Dalyot, ). This smart phone‐embedded device‐based collection method benefits from promising geographic resolution, deployment and mobility. Social networks: People's evolution of attitude towards long‐term meteorological phenomena and short‐term emergency communications can be extracted by mining their opinions from social network sites (SNS) (Liu & Zhao, ; Sisco et al , ; Veltri & Atanasova, ; Rossi et al , ). As free communication platforms, social networks accommodate different angles and attitudes expressed by people of different backgrounds and roles.…”

Communicating high impact weather: Improving warnings and decision making processes

“…Reviewing the Australian weather warnings landscape, Anderson-Berry et al note the role that social media communities have in disseminating weather warnings, and psychologically supporting those in at risk areas. Rossi et al (2018) meanwhile, approach social media from another perspective: exploring whether data gathered from the microblogging service Twitter can be used to help verify the occurrence of high impact weather events, and provide additional details about these events. Focussing on the 2016 Piedmont floods in northern Italy, their findings suggest that data crowdsourced from the public in this manner has the potential to both verify forecasts and provide enhanced information to agencies responsible for emergency response.…”

“…While all of the papers within this special issue focus on the challenge of communicating high impact weather events, they employ a broad range approaches to doing so. Methodologies represented include interviews (Bostrom et al, 2018;de la Poterie et al, 2018), surveys (Bostrom et al, 2018;Morss et al, 2018;Potter et al, 2018), judgement and decision experiments (Casteel, 2018;Ihti et al, 2018;Losee et al, 2018;Morss et al;Potter et al), participatory stakeholder workshops (Kox et al 2018), case studies (Gladfelter, 2018), ethnography (Balay-As et al, 2018), conceptual reviews (Anderson-Berry et al, 2018) and social media analysis (Rossi et al, 2018). However, despite the diverse range of perspectives represented, common themes are clearly identifiable.…”

Location reference identification from tweets during emergencies: A deep learning approach

“…In recent years, Twitter has been used extensively in the course of natural and human-made disasters such as earthquakes, floods, fire, terrorist attacks, civil unrest, and so on (Alexander, 2014;Landwehr et al, 2016;Laylavi et al, 2017Laylavi et al, , 2016Luna & Pennock, 2018;Mejri et al, 2017;Mendoza et al, 2010;Sakaki et al, 2013;Singh et al, 2017;Yuan & Liu, 2018). The government and non-government agencies use Twitter in case of crisis so that different rescue operations can leap into action, disseminate information to the wider audience, and recognize floor reality (Imran et al, 2014a(Imran et al, , 2015Landwehr et al, 2016;Laylavi et al, 2017Laylavi et al, , 2016Rossi et al, 2018;Sakaki et al, 2013;Zhou et al, 2017). In an American Red Cross survey, a question was asked to individuals that "whom they contacted in an emergency?"…”