The Societal Echo of Severe Weather Events: Ambient Geospatial Information (AGI) on a Storm Event

Abstract

The given article focuses on the benefit of harvested Ambient Geographic Information (AGI) as complementary data sources for severe weather events and provides methodical approaches for the spatio-temporal analysis of such data. The perceptions and awareness of Twitter users posting about severe weather patterns were explored as there were aspects not documented by official damage reports or derived from official weather data. We analysed Tweets regarding the severe storm event Friederike to map their spatio-temporal patterns. More than 50% of the retrieved >23.000 tweets were geocoded by applying supervised information retrievals, text mining, and geospatial analysis methods. Complementary, central topics were clustered and linked to official weather data for cross-evaluation. The data confirmed (1) a scale-dependent relationship between the wind speed and the societal echo. In addition, the study proved that (2) reporting activity is moderated by population distribution. An in-depth analysis of the crowds’ central topic clusters in response to the storm Friederike (3) revealed a plausible sequence of dominant communication contents during the severe weather event. In particular, the merge of the studied AGI and other environmental datasets at different spatio-temporal scales shows how such user-generated content can be a useful complementary data source to study severe weather events and the ensuing societal echo.

Keywords

• harvesting
• Ambient Geospatial Information
• crisis informatics
• big data
• Web 2.0
• user-generated content