Flooded street on Sept. 29, 2015. in Miami Beach, Florida, which engaged in a five-year, $400 million storm water pump program. Joe Raedle | Getty Images News | Getty Images |
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The study focusing on flood levels along the U.S. East and Gulf Coasts found that 22 counties experience nuisance flooding at water levels much lower than what an official gauge would register as a flood. Cities in the counties include New York, Miami and Boston, which have a combined population of over 13 million people.
“Our analysis implies that large populations might currently be exposed to nuisance flooding not identified via standard measures,” said the report by Frances C. Moore of the University of California, Davis’ Department of Environmental Science and Policy and Nick Obradovich of the Max Plank Institute for Human Development in Berlin.
To conduct their analysis, the scientists turned to Twitter.
As the climate crisis intensifies and natural disasters become more frequent and powerful, scientists are increasingly turning to social media as a way to assess the damage and impact on a more localized scale.
In this case, Twitter was useful because the 3,700 miles of the East and Gulf Coasts have only about 132 tidal gauge stations. This means it’s difficult to measure the impact of changing water levels on specific areas.
“The extent of flooding may be highly variable within a small geographic area, depending on local topography,” the scientists said. Additionally, the consequences of higher water levels vary across regions. For instance, two areas could experience the same amount of flooding, but one could include a frequently trafficked road, while the other could be on farmland.
Given the geographic reach of Twitter, as well as the volume and location-specific nature of tweets, the platform can be used to track “nuisance coastal flooding that is both more regular and less consequential,” the researchers said. Because the consequences of this type of flood are annoying rather than deadly, they’re not always measured or recorded.
Two cars are caught by a wave coming over the seawall as heavy seas come ashore in Winthrop, Mass., in 2018. Michael Dwyer | AP |
To monitor changes in Twitter activity, they defined a “remarkable threshold” for coastal flooding as when county-specific Twitter posts increased by 25%. They then compared this data with official flood records. “Minor tidal flooding that is remarkable to residents happens at a tide height different from that defining minor coastal flooding,” the scientists concluded.
The researchers noted that while flooding caused by high tides and storm surges is already increasing, it’s set to become “more frequent and severe as sea-levels rise globally.”
A woman crosses a flooded street in 2015. Jim Watson | AFP | Getty Images |
Several drawbacks and inconsistencies come with using social media, the researchers noted.
For one, Twitter is a self-selecting crowd and subset of the population. Prior research has also shown that the more people experience things, the less remarkable they become. In other words, while someone may have tweeted about the first few floods they experienced, after a while it becomes commonplace rather than notable. Additionally, places that experience frequent flooding could bolster their infrastructure, meaning still-recurring higher water levels would be less noticeable.
However, several studies have warned about the danger to coastal communities as sea levels rise.
“Coastal floods and inundation are projected to produce some of the primary social impacts of climate change, imposing significant costs on communities around the world,” the report concluded.
Links
- Study says 630 million could be living below projected flood levels by 2100
- Using remarkability to define coastal flooding thresholds (pdf)
- Australian climate change research
- The science of climate change
- Five climate change science misconceptions – debunked
- Fires and floods: maps of Europe predict scale of climate catastrophe
- UK unprepared for COP 26 conference, warn climate leaders
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