The Spatiotemporal Patterns of National-scale Drought Awareness
Abstract
Drought is a creeping climatological phenomenon with persistent precipitation deficits. There is still a lack of social response to an emerging drought because of the intangible characteristics. Local drought awareness can be measured based on how much mass media reports and/or search engine inquiries increase during the emergency of a local drought. High level of this local drought awareness leads to concerns for water shortage and supports for water policy. However, it is difficult to investigate national-scale drought awareness for example how actual drought risk at local and remote regions is associated with local drought awareness due to the limited sample sizes and costs of survey data collection. In this study, we present national-scale research to study the spatiotemporal characteristics of drought awareness across the 49 Contiguous United States (CONUS) using Google Trends data and principle component analysis (PCA). Results show that PC1 and PC2 explain 38% and 10% of variance of state-level drought awareness over the CONUS. PC1 is related to a national pattern of drought awareness across the CONUS. Unlike actual drought risk, national-scale drought awareness has relationship across adjacent and remote states in US to the geographical location of the drought occurrence. The spatiotemporal patterns from PC1 can imply that residents living in the Northeastern region are sensitive to drought occurrences even if the region does not experience a local drought. These results explain that big dataset from search engine inquiries and social media can help improve the current water policy and water resource management more efficiently and effectively.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFM.H13T2056K
- Keywords:
-
- 1807 Climate impacts;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1880 Water management;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1918 Decision analysis;
- INFORMATICS;
- 6309 Decision making under uncertainty;
- POLICY SCIENCES & PUBLIC ISSUES