Social media could help monitor air pollution that physical monitors miss.

High Country News

In their study, published by the International Conference on Social Media & Society, Sachdeva and McCaffrey analyzed close to 39,000 tweets posted between May and September 2015 in California. They stripped the tweets to reveal their core subjects: smoke in the air, fallen ash, haziness, smell. By tagging the tweets with the location in which they were posted, the researchers created a verbatim map: a landscape of fire based on the people who experienced it. Their modeling proved accurate when compared to figures from air quality monitors.

Click here to read “Using Social Media to Predict Air Pollution during California Wildfires”