Cargando…

Mining Social Media to Identify Heat Waves

Heat waves are one of the deadliest of natural hazards and their frequency and intensity will likely increase as the climate continues to warm. A challenge in studying these phenomena is the lack of a universally accepted quantitative definition that captures both temperature anomalies and associate...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Cecinati, Francesca, Matthews, Tom, Natarajan, Sukumar, McCullen, Nick, Coley, David
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6427652/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30832387
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16050762
_version_ 1783405259547213824
author Cecinati, Francesca
Matthews, Tom
Natarajan, Sukumar
McCullen, Nick
Coley, David
author_facet Cecinati, Francesca
Matthews, Tom
Natarajan, Sukumar
McCullen, Nick
Coley, David
author_sort Cecinati, Francesca
collection PubMed
description Heat waves are one of the deadliest of natural hazards and their frequency and intensity will likely increase as the climate continues to warm. A challenge in studying these phenomena is the lack of a universally accepted quantitative definition that captures both temperature anomalies and associated mortality. We test the hypothesis that social media mining can be used to identify heat wave mortality. Applying the approach to India, we find that the number of heat-related tweets correlates with heat-related mortality much better than traditional climate-based indicators, especially at larger scales, which identify many heat wave days that do not lead to excess mortality. We conclude that social media based heat wave identification can complement climatic data and can be used to: (1) study heat wave impacts at large scales or in developing countries, where mortality data are difficult to obtain and uncertain, and (2) to track dangerous heat wave events in real time.
format Online
Article
Text
id pubmed-6427652
institution National Center for Biotechnology Information
language English
publishDate 2019
publisher MDPI
record_format MEDLINE/PubMed
spelling pubmed-64276522019-04-10 Mining Social Media to Identify Heat Waves Cecinati, Francesca Matthews, Tom Natarajan, Sukumar McCullen, Nick Coley, David Int J Environ Res Public Health Article Heat waves are one of the deadliest of natural hazards and their frequency and intensity will likely increase as the climate continues to warm. A challenge in studying these phenomena is the lack of a universally accepted quantitative definition that captures both temperature anomalies and associated mortality. We test the hypothesis that social media mining can be used to identify heat wave mortality. Applying the approach to India, we find that the number of heat-related tweets correlates with heat-related mortality much better than traditional climate-based indicators, especially at larger scales, which identify many heat wave days that do not lead to excess mortality. We conclude that social media based heat wave identification can complement climatic data and can be used to: (1) study heat wave impacts at large scales or in developing countries, where mortality data are difficult to obtain and uncertain, and (2) to track dangerous heat wave events in real time. MDPI 2019-03-02 2019-03 /pmc/articles/PMC6427652/ /pubmed/30832387 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16050762 Text en © 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Cecinati, Francesca
Matthews, Tom
Natarajan, Sukumar
McCullen, Nick
Coley, David
Mining Social Media to Identify Heat Waves
title Mining Social Media to Identify Heat Waves
title_full Mining Social Media to Identify Heat Waves
title_fullStr Mining Social Media to Identify Heat Waves
title_full_unstemmed Mining Social Media to Identify Heat Waves
title_short Mining Social Media to Identify Heat Waves
title_sort mining social media to identify heat waves
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6427652/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30832387
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16050762
work_keys_str_mv AT cecinatifrancesca miningsocialmediatoidentifyheatwaves
AT matthewstom miningsocialmediatoidentifyheatwaves
AT natarajansukumar miningsocialmediatoidentifyheatwaves
AT mccullennick miningsocialmediatoidentifyheatwaves
AT coleydavid miningsocialmediatoidentifyheatwaves