PILOT SYSTEM MONITORS TWEETS FOR DROUGHT EARLY WARNING

LINCOLN — Millions use Twitter to share their rapid-fire opinions, observations and connections to real-time events. And natural disasters are often major conversation starters. With that in mind, National Drought Mitigation Center assistant director Kelly Helm Smith wanted to see what tweets said about the impacts of drought, and whether tweets could contribute to a drought early warning system.

Smith embarked on a pilot study, the results of which were recently published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. She developed a method to monitor the rate of tweets about dr...