Using Twitter to Monitor the Smoke Impact of Wildfires

The final paper in this final session of Social Media & Society 2018 is Sonya Sachdeva, whose interest is in the role of social media in discussing the smoke from wildfires. Wildfires themselves have become more prevalent and more intense around the world, as a result of climate change, and the smoke from such fires can affect far larger areas than the fires themselves. Some two thirds of the United States are affected by the smoke from wildfires, even if they are nowhere near forests and firezones.

If accurate assessments of air quality are unavailable due to gaps in monitoring stations, then, might social media provide useful information that could plug some of these gaps? The present study began with the analysis of a major 2014 fire in Northern California; it connected available air quality information with the incidence of tweets discussing air quality. This produced some useful relationships, and a further extension to all Californian fires in 2015 supported these findings.

But these data also point to the mental models by which people encounter, adapt to, and manage wildfire and smoke risk. This includes comments on the fires and their impacts, sharing of news stories, and the posting of images, as well as more general responses such as thanks to firefighters, prayers for the fires to stop, or information on donation opportunities in support of victims. Such themes change with users’ distance to the fire: those close to the location talk about the immediate impacts of the fire and express their gratitude to firefighters, whereas others address more general issues. There is a need to further extend these studies to countries other than the United States, which may well be even more severely affected by wildfires.