Social Media and Severe Weather Do Tweets Provide a Valid Indicator of Public Attention to Severe Weather Risk Communication

The authors analyzed over 3 million tweets between 25 April and 11 November 2012 to determine if Twitter activity was a good indicator of public attention to severe weather communication. Overall results supported the notion that social media data can be used to develop valid indicators of real-time attention to severe weather communication, but the authors suggest that researchers “develop a system that is capable of separating the signal (tweets from attentive members of the public) from the noise (everything else) in near–real time” to help communicators meaningfully track the effect of their messages on attention as they are disseminated.