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Twitter as an Emergency Broadcast System

Friday, August 21st, 2009 | By: Justin Kozuch

If you live in Toronto, then surely you know that a massive storm swept through yesterday evening, dumping rain and debris onto city streets. At one point, funnel clouds touched down at the foot of Jarvis Street (only 2 streets away from where I’m sitting).

Dave Fleet wrote an excellent post this morning, “A Quick Social Media Analysis Of The Toronto Storm“, and it got me thinking. Given the number of Twitter users in Toronto, and that Twitter supports SMS notifications, can Twitter be used as an Emergency Broadcast System?

How it could work

We’re going to use Toronto as an example for this blog post. Let’s say that Environment Canada issues a Tornado warning for Toronto. Environment Canada would post to their Twitter account a warning message, and it could look something like:

#Tornado warning in effect for #Toronto. Rainfall 20-25mm, winds N NW 80kmh+. Full details at http://weath.er/uEVYM

Citizen Weather Reporting

Yesterday’s storm generated dozens of videos and photographs of some incredible localized weather systems:

Photo taken by Janine Massey

Photo taken by Janine Massey

Photo taken by Colin

Photo taken by Colin

Photo taken by Scott

Photo taken by Scott

To help provide weather reporting stations with an accurate, on the ground reporting system, citizen journalists could tweet links to video or photos using a message similar to:

http://twitpic.com/en5vp Storm in #HighPark #M6P, heading #East #Lightning #Rain #HighWinds

Weather tracking stations reporting on the weather systems could then use this data to track storm intensity, direction, and get a better sense of what’s happening on the ground, and make better predictions on storm behaviour based on accurate reporting. Ultimately, it comes down to the quality of the data.

What do you think? Is Twitter a feasible EBS system for weather, natural disasters, et cetera? Is it a reliable platform for weather reporting and prediction? How can we use Twitter effectively as an EBS?

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Category: Opinion |

  • I think as a result of many of the Tweets coming off of mobile devices the geocodes should be invaluable in recording position and direction of an oncoming storm front. With Twitter announcing the geolocation functionality being released to developers this should give the service the ability to track storm events from a user perspective as well as meteorological measurements (ie. lightning strike trackers). We could note downed trees & powerlines, flooded roads, snow drifts, etc.

    A service like this would probably be best represented as a mapping application, with the layers of information being able to be toggled on/off.
  • Wow - great idea Brent. I really like the mapping application concept - I'm sure there is a way to mashup this data into Google Maps.

    I've heard about the geolocation functionality, didn't even think of it until now. Good looking out!
  • Yes, Twitter could be great for emergency broadcasts. Requirements:

    1. Twitter needs to become much more reliable. It may be okay for some ordinary tweets to be missing in the stream, but not for emergency tweets.

    2. There needs to be a way for people to get interrupted with such urgent news at pretty much any time in their lives, not just when they happen to be online and monitoring Twitter.

    Thoughts on point 2:

    - For most people an SMS text message would be the best interruption mechanism. While Twitter provides the option (depending on country and carrier) to get an SMS notification of every tweet from every followed source, most people don't want such a flood of messages. At least one service, TwitSMS, permits a text to be generated only for tweets from the sources you specify, but one must pay money for this and organizations like Environment Canada may not be all that interested in supporting a new information channel that requires user spending. Perhaps TwitSMS could provide free notifications for approved emergency services, as a marketing tactic to attract new users (i.e. adopt the freemium model). Or (preferably) Twitter itself would add selective SMS as a feature at some point.

    - There is also the DM mechanism for receiving more-important tweets. Environment Canada could have a Twitter ID specifically for Toronto-area emergencies, which could DM each of its followers whenever appropriate. This would however require that users be able to see their incoming DMs quickly (currently email notifications are often delayed), and that sources be able to send a lot of DMs quickly (API and sending limits could perhaps be worked around by Environment Canada's running multiple Twitter IDs for large cities).
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