Study Measures Impact of Hurricane Sandy By Millions of Pictures Posted on Flickr

A new study highlights a strong association between the number of pictures of superstorm Sandy posted on Flickr and the air pressure in New Jersey when the hurricane ravaged areas of Northeast Coast in 2012. The study claims that using online indicators can help the government measure the impact of disasters.

Hurricane Sandy that hit the East Coast on Oct. 29 is considered one of the deadliest and devastating superstorms. The scenes of chaos and destruction were captured by several professional and amateur photographers who shared their pictures on the image hosting website 'Flickr'. There were 32 million photos posted on Flickr in 2012 that were tagged as either 'Hurricane' or 'Sandy or 'Hurricane Sandy'.

In the current study led by two Warwick Business School academics, Tobias Preis and Suzy Moat, the researchers looked at pictures tagged as ' Hurricane', 'Sandy' or 'Hurricane Sandy' between October 20 and November 20,2012.

On analyzing the pictures they discovered a strong connection between the number of pictures posted and the severity of the storm. As the severity increased and the atmospheric pressure dropped, the number of pictures posted also rose.  They also observed a greater number of pictures were posted in the hour that superstorm Sandy made a landfall in New Jersey.

 Dr. Moat explained, "As the severity of a hurricane in a given area increases, atmospheric pressure drops. We found that as atmospheric pressure in New Jersey fell to its worst lows, the number of photos taken rose, and as atmospheric pressure in New Jersey climbed again, the number of photos taken fell. 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."

The study In Quantifying the Digital Traces of Hurricane Sandy on Flickr, will be published in Scientific Reports.