Using nightlight remote sensing imagery and twitter data to study power outages

Carolynne Hultquist, Mark Simpson, Guido Cervone, Qunying Huang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

26 Scopus citations

Abstract

Hurricane Sandy made landfall in one of the most populated areas of the United States, and affected almost 8 million people. The event provides a unique opportunity to study power outages because of the data available and the large impact to a densely populated area. Satellite nightlight imagery of "before" and "after" the landfall of the hurricane is used to quantify the light dimming caused by power outages. Geolocated tweets filtered by keywords provide valuable information on human activity at a high temporal and spatial resolution during the event. Analysis of brightness change in the satellite data and the density of power related tweets points to a spatial relationship that identifies severely impacted areas with human presence. Classification of tweets through text analysis serves to further narrow the information search to find the most relevant and reliable content. Twitter data fused with satellite imagery identifies power outage information at a street-level resolution that is not achievable with satellite imagery alone.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on the Use of GIS in Emergency Management, EM-GIS 2015
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
ISBN (Electronic)9781595930361
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 3 2015
Event1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on the Use of GIS in Emergency Management, EM-GIS 2015 - Seattle, United States
Duration: Nov 3 2015 → …

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on the Use of GIS in Emergency Management, EM-GIS 2015

Other

Other1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on the Use of GIS in Emergency Management, EM-GIS 2015
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySeattle
Period11/3/15 → …

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Safety Research
  • Business, Management and Accounting (miscellaneous)
  • Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality

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