Social sensing of floods in the UK

Social sensing of floods in the UK

"Social sensing" is a form of crowd-sourcing that involves systematic analysis of digital communications to detect real-world events. Here we consider the use of social sensing for observing natural hazards. In particular, we present a case study that uses data from a popular social media...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2018-01, Vol.13 (1), p.e0189327-e0189327
Main Authors: Arthur, Rudy, Boulton, Chris A, Shotton, Humphrey, Williams, Hywel T P
Format: Article
Language:eng
Subjects:
Analysis
Bayesian analysis
Biology and Life Sciences
Case studies
Computer and Information Sciences
Crowdsourcing
Detection
Digital media
Earth Sciences
Earthquakes
Ecology and Environmental Sciences
Filters
Flood mapping
Floods
Hazards
Hydrologic data
Information management
Place names
Social media
Social networks
Social Sciences
Technology application
United Kingdom
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Summary:"Social sensing" is a form of crowd-sourcing that involves systematic analysis of digital communications to detect real-world events. Here we consider the use of social sensing for observing natural hazards. In particular, we present a case study that uses data from a popular social media platform (Twitter) to detect and locate flood events in the UK. In order to improve data quality we apply a number of filters (timezone, simple text filters and a naive Bayes 'relevance' filter) to the data. We then use place names in the user profile and message text to infer the location of the tweets. These two steps remove most of the irrelevant tweets and yield orders of magnitude more located tweets than we have by relying on geo-tagged data. We demonstrate that high resolution social sensing of floods is feasible and we can produce high-quality historical and real-time maps of floods using Twitter.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203