Flood Disaster Management System for Situation Awareness and Response Using Twitter Data

Part 1: Information Analysis for Situation Awareness International audience Social media has increasingly become a convenient tool for sharing and consuming information during emergencies and disasters such as floods. The annual floods of the River Nile in South Sudan devastates lives and property, leaving towns and villages submerged. The present study focuses on utilizing data from Twitter to develop a Flood Disaster Management System for Situation Awareness. Tweets about flooding are gathered and filtered from Twitter. Tweet location or mentions of locations or hashtags are important in getting the relevant content on flooding in South Sudan. Towns with reported flooding are represented on a web application with GIS functionalities. Information for Situation Awareness is generated and shared with flood victims, potential victims and humanitarian organizations, governmental and non-governmental organizations concerned with disaster response. The data collected during the half of the 2021 rainy season was experimentally used to evaluate this research and two of the areas reported to have had severe flooding in July and August 2021 based on Twitter data were also featured in an information report released by the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the first week of August 2021. The study aims to fully operationalize the Flood Disaster Management System for Situation Awareness and Response using Twitter in the next rainy season in 2022. This study shows that social media, particularly twitter is vital for gathering user generated flood related data and generating information for situation awareness which in turn can improve awareness and disaster response by partners concerned with disasters.