Social media like Flickr can potentially track natural disasters and other major events in real-time and help governments in measuring their impact, according to a new study.
The study has discovered a striking connection between the number of pictures of Hurricane Sandy posted on Flickr and the atmospheric pressure in New Jersey, as the hurricane crashed through the US state in 2012.
Hurricane Sandy was the second-costliest hurricane to hit the US, hitting 24 states in late October last year, with New Jersey being one of the worst affected.
In 2012, 32 million photos were posted on image hosting website Flickr and by counting the number of pictures tagged either Hurricane Sandy, hurricane or sandy between October 20 and November 20 2012, a team of researchers led by two Warwick Business School academics, Tobias Preis, Associate Professor of Behavioural Science and Finance, and Suzy Moat, Assistant Professor of Behavioural Science, found a strong link to atmospheric pressure dropping in New Jersey.
In fact, the highest number of pictures posted were taken in the same hour in which Hurricane Sandy made landfall in New Jersey.
In 'Quantifying the Digital Traces of Hurricane Sandy on Flickr', to be published in Scientific Reports Tobias Preis and Suzy Moat, of Warwick Business School, Steven Bishop and Philip Treleaven, of UCL, and H. Eugene Stanley, of Boston University, suggest that using such online indicators could help governments measure the impact of disasters.
Our steadily increasing use of digital technology is opening up new and fruitful ways to document and follow human actions, said Dr Preis.
"Building on our recent work, we asked whether data from photos uploaded to Flickr could have been used to measure the impact of Hurricane Sandy."
Our new results show that the greatest number of photos taken with Flickr titles, descriptions or tags including the words hurricane, sandy or Hurricane Sandy were taken in exactly the hour which Hurricane Sandy made landfall in New Jersey.
Examination of the number of Hurricane Sandy related photos taken before and after landfall reveals a striking correlation with environmental measurements of the development of the hurricane.
As the severity of a hurricane in a given area increases, atmospheric pressure drops. We found that as atmospheric pressure in New Jersey fell the number of photos taken rose and as atmospheric pressure climbed again the number of photos taken fell, Dr Moat added.
Plotting the data revealed that the number of photos taken increased continuously while Sandy was moving towards the coast of the US.
