From the University of Warwick, and the ultra-short baseline department comes this study of ridiculous proportions. I don’t have the words to accurately describe this utter waste of time and money. I can just see future NOAA bulletins:
HURRICANE WHOPPER FORECAST/ADVISORY NUMBER 18
NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL AL122005
2100Z SAT AUG 27 2015
AT 4 PM CDT…2100Z…THE HURRICANE WATCH IS EXTENDED WESTWARD TO
INTRACOASTAL CITY LOUISIANA AND EASTWARD TO THE FLORIDA-ALABAMA BORDER. A HURRICANE WATCH IS NOW IN EFFECT ALONG THE NORTHERN GULF COAST FROM INTRACOASTAL CITY TO THE ALABAMA-FLORIDA BORDER.
GIVEN THE ACTIVITY MEASURED ON FACEBOOK, TWITTER, AND FLICKR A HURRICANE WARNING WILL LIKELY BE REQUIRED FOR PORTIONS OF THE
NORTHERN GULF COAST LATER TONIGHT OR SUNDAY. INTERESTS IN THIS AREA SHOULD MONITOR THE PROGRESS OF WHOPPER AND POST PICTURES OF ANY OBSERVED STORM ACTIVITY TO HELP NHC GAUGE CENTRAL PRESSURE.
Hurricane Sandy’s impact measured by millions of Flickr pictures
A new 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 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 today (Tuesday November 5), 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.
Preis and Moat’s work has previously uncovered a range of intriguing links between what people look for online and their behaviour in the real world. Recent results revealed that changes in how frequently people searched for financial information on Google and Wikipedia could be interpreted as early signs of stock market moves, and that internet users in countries with a higher per capita GDP search for more information about the future.
“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.” Dr Moat added: “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. (See graphs attached)
“Plotting the data revealed that the number of photos taken increased continuously while ‘Sandy’ was moving towards the coast of the US. This study would suggest that in cases where no external sensors are available, it may be possible to use the number of Flickr photos relating to a topic to gauge the current level of this category of problems.
“Flickr can be considered as a system of large scale real-time sensors, documenting collective human attention. Increases in Flickr photo counts with particular labels may reveal notable increases in attention to a particular issue, which in some cases may merit further investigation for policy makers.
“Appropriate leverage of such online indicators of large disasters could be useful to policy makers and others charged with emergency crisis management: in particular if no secondary environmental measures are available.”
Quantifying the Digital Traces of Hurricane Sandy on Flickr is published in Nature Publishing Group’s Scientific Reports today, at http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/131105/srep03141/full/srep03141.html
This URL will become live when the embargo lifts at 2pm UK time on November 5 2013. Copies of the paper ahead of the embargo can also be requested from Tobias.Preis@wbs.ac.uk.
Jquip says:
November 5, 2013 at 2:10 pm
“And if that’s not suitable by itself, FEMA already uses IHOP — yes, International House of Pancakes — as their go-to gold model of managing disasters. So even if you state the government isn’t feckless; the government already states that it is, and that it fails to be as good as a hillbilly breakfast joint.”
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Pancakes sound really good right now, even better if served in a “hillbilly breakfast joint”, 2 eggs up on top of the stack, drowning in butter.
Well I’d hardly expect people to be taking hundred of pictures of hurricane damage while the atmospheric pressure is highish and the hurricane is somewhere else! If damage increases towards the centre, and pressure decreases then the number of shots of conditions and damage should have a correlation with central pressure. Anyone want to quantify that? How about a comparison of a storm in the wilderness with one in a big population centre?
“If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
While the tracking of the use of social-media to report events in order to determine their severity or impact does, on the surface, have merit, it ignores the fact that the tendency of such tracking leads to diversion of focus from areas which are possibly more at risk.
The fact that Sandy hit the media center of the world led to the hyperbole that turned a strong tropical storm into a “SUPERSTORM”. Just imagine the actual damage, and death toll, if Sandy had been the same intensity as Katrina when it made landfall. Would those same twits using social media have listened to the warnings and evacuated the area? I doubt it very much – they would have been too busy taking pictures until they drowned.
Excellent piece of work. I would suggest their next research to look into the relationship between bed and death. Since the majority of deaths in the western world happened on a horizontal platform commonly called bed, they might conclude that the bed is the most dangerous furniture in our home. These bright people can really connect the dots. The freedom and support academics enjoy nowadays is amazing (nasty climate denying studies excluded).
They determined that more pictures were taken when the thing hit land. So the null hypothesis was that people would be taking the same (or more?) amount of pictures of the hurricane while it was still out to sea???????
I suspect that what awakened Anthony’s Angry Inner Meteorologist was the spurious use of the term “millibars.” If they’d just said something sensible like “as the storm came closer” or “as the storm intensified” with a couple of illustrative graphics (which could include the barometric pressure along a timeline, for example), I doubt if anyone would care. But, presumably to make it seem more “sciency” they made the stupid correlation with BP.
It’s just another lightweight piece of “research” from the School of Inconsequential Studies at Warwick.
And while there is merit in analysing social media, and many large corporations do it, this study doesn’t add anything useful to the store of human knowledge, IMO. So, when a big event happens, people on the spot take photos and put them on Flickr? Well, duh.
johanna;
It’s just another lightweight piece of “research”
>>>>>>>>>>>>
Oh it is absolutely lightweight, I’ll agree to that. What is going on in the private and military sectors is light years ahead of this.
What a reassuring sight it must be to see FEMA staff browsing flickr, facebook or twitter in the middle of a disaster.
Can you just imagine what people could have done instead of stopping to take pictures?
Hurricanes, Tropical Storms, and Tropical Depressions have uniform definitions. The word Superstorm is a media creation, based upon its landfall location. With 70 knot winds at landfall, Sandy would have been a minimal hurricane at most. If Sandy had made landfall in Kenedy County, Texas (Pop. 414), the news would be buried in the back pages of the national news.
Part of the reason for this is the ongoing childish idealism regarding democratic majority rule: that which is popular is better and more correct. Real science is a wretchedly individualistic, sacrificial matter.
Sandy was a tropical storm. Sustained wind speeds recorded at the surface reached 25 meters per second at two offshore buoys for short times. Winds over land were much less.
Hurricane force winds are defined by sustained surface speeds of 33 meters per second.
Most recorded sustained winds were around 20 meters per second at storm peak. Photos of land damage are consistent with tropical storm class winds.
Sandy surface area increased when merging with a second meso-scale storm. Also, landfall timing was coincident with high tides. Most damage was tidal surge on an unprepared coastal area.
Sandy class storms landing around the southeast US, Cuba or the bahamas would not be of concern to the locals.
davidmhoffer has a point that there may be some use in time-spatial terms of this type of thing, but certainly it is only the time and locality that are the data points – no one’s going to scan the actual millions of pictures in any reasonable time for detail. From the press release, I’m not sure the researchers even saw what david saw. I was immediately reminded of a goofy scientific paper back in the 1960s – I think it was in Psychology Today or some such in which a medical doctor put carbon monoxide monitors along a California freeway and noted the correlation that high concentration of CO coincided with the frequency of traffic accidents and deaths. He mused that CO is an irritant that causes people to be irritable and less careful. I understood the article above to be about a proxy for dangerous storms arriving, almost as if low pressure caused people to whip out there cell phones. Surely they already knew what the pressure was and where it was making landfall.
davidmhoffer says:
“We have a propensity to dismiss out of hand studies like this as useful predictors of anything, and correctly so.”
But on the other hand, a study like this is a useful postdictor.
Jimbo asks: “Was this published in the Journal of Improbable Research?”. Answer: Yes”.
Johanna reckons it was “from the School of Inconsequential Studies at Warwick.” This must be a sister faculty to the School of Inconsequential Studies at the Australian National University.
Really, when you think about it, the correlation with atmospheric pressure, is about as good, or better, than the correlation of global warming with atmospheric CO2 concentration. Which shows how much the latter is worth.
Attention, its control, direction, misdirection, and market value are the basis of the economy and politics. Is it now the basis of science, too?
Dudley, I am a Canberran. h/t local journalist Ian Warden for the School of Inconsequential Studies. There seems to be a network of these Schools around the world.
University of Warwick used to be pretty good academically too. How depressing.