Scientists use Twitter to work out if it’s raining

Twitter is a very interesting tool. Besides serving as a source of news or a form of communication for a large number of people worldwide, people have also been studying how tweets have an impact on our lives and world around us. For example, recently there was a study on tweets that showed how the moods of people changed throughout the day.

Well now it’s been reported that some professors have discovered that by using Twitter, they can work out where it’s raining. By monitoring location-tagged tweets for keywords related to rain, and comparing them against respective weather reports, they’ve come to a conclusion that tweets do match what’s going on with the real world. The same thing could be done with keywords such as flu as well.

While it’s no surprise that Twitter can be used to discover the obvious – what’s interesting is that while Twitter doesn’t represent the general population of the world (it is only 0.00028% of the world’s 7 billion human beings), the study proves that Twitter can be used to track an event. The scientists will continue studying the social network with hopes on improving their accuracy on pinpointing situations “such as a flu outbreak or electoral voting intentions.”

George Wong
Categories: Web
Tags: research, Twitter