Scientists are using social media to determine air quality

Monday, September 26, 2016, 5:52 PM - Researchers have just found a way to gauge air quality based on social media posts.

A multidisciplinary study conducted by scientists at Texas's Rice University shows the frequency of words like cough, haze, dust, or blue sky, can be a "proxy measurement" of the amount of pollution in China's "megacities" at a specific time.

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Select words were curated from millions of posts on Weibo, a popular social media platform in China.Computer scientists at Rice University were examining the data for a study on Chinese social media censorhip a few years ago.

Dan Wallach, Rice University computer scientist, and Daniel Cohan, environmental engineer, led the study that will be released in PLOS One, an open-access journal.

“The big takeaway is that people grouse about air quality, and as it gets worse, people complain more,” said Wallach in a statement.

"When it’s really bad, it flattens out. They’re as complained-out as they’re going to be. And if it gets good enough, few people complain. But there’s a zone in the middle where people really grouse, and we can measure that."

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The scientists devised their own metric: Air Discussion Index (ADI). It's based on the rate that pollution-related words appeared in the 112 million posts culled from 2011 to 2013.

Residents from Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chengdu, authored the millions of posts, and unsurprisingly -- these are the cities where pollution is believed to be worst in China.

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SOURCE: Rice University