Enriching the Twitter Stream – Multifaceted Engagement with Citizen Scientists Bill Teng NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data and information Services Center (GES DISC) Team members: Arif Albayrak, Carlee Loeser, Jim Acker Building the NASA Citizen Science Community, June 21, 2019

Approach to crowd-sourcing Not require participants to explicitly “sign up” to contribute. To effectively crowd-source, a large source of crowd is needed. Twitter is such a source.

Number of tweets collected March 2017 winter storm Number of tweets collected Start: 2017-03-13 22:23:12 – End: 2017-03-14 19:05:31 Total # tweets # tweets w/ geo-location # tweets w/ geo-tag (place) Global 1,227,390 22,880 34,535 U.S. 13,269 20,349

Organic network of rain gauges Space-time-varying set of “precipitation tweets” Reading the “gauge measurements” Develop infrastructure for processing and analyzing tweets Enhancing quality of tweets; engaging with “active” participants Applying processed tweets to satellite data validation Managing tweet data

Tweet processing infrastructure Local Tweet Database Tweet Stream (Passive & Hashtaged) Clean Normalize Pre-Process Request Query Rain, snow etc. Twitter API Find Precip Type, Intensity Classify GPM/TRMM & Tweet Co-Locate States, Counties Statistics Distribution etc. Visualize Data Ground Truth Meta Data Output Online Process Feed Train Patterns (Coef) Test Learning (Tweet type, intensity) coefficients Training Parameters &data set Offline Process Prepare Training Data Set Training Data Set Near Real Time Visualization Filter; pre-process Compare Manage

Distribution of tweets March 2017 snow event Distribution of tweets

Observed snowfall & MRMS*-tweet map March 2017 winter storm Observed snowfall & MRMS*-tweet map *Multi-Radar/Multi-Sensor System (NOAA NSSL)

March 2017 snow event Manhattan

March 2017 snow event Manhattan # tweets ~Midnight – 6 am MRMS

Organic network of rain gauges Space-time-varying set of “precipitation tweets” Reading the “gauge measurements” Develop infrastructure for processing and analyzing tweets Enhancing quality of tweets; engaging with “active” participants Applying processed tweets to satellite data validation Managing tweet data

Enriching the Twitter stream #mping2nasa (“active”) scientist random people local news amateur weather station “passive” #edumdcsp (“active”) #twrain2nasa (“active”) #umbrella4gpm (“active”) mPING reports Students @NASA_GESDISC followers Umbrella-as-gauge #futurehashtag (“active”) Future sources, … Enriching the Twitter stream #fb2nasa (“active”) Facebook weather reports

Tweeting protocol for “active” participants A. Content of tweet 1- Hashtag #twrain2nasa 2- Precipitation (Yes, No) a. If Yes i. Precipitation type * Rain * Freezing rain * Sleet * Snow * Hail (include descriptive size, e.g., “baseball size”) ii. Precipitation intensity * Light * Moderate * Heavy iii. Begin/end times (if known) b. If No i. Sunny ii. Partly sunny/partly cloudy iii. Cloudy 3- Additional information, if available a. Current conditions (quantitative, if possible) i. Temperature * e.g., 75F * Or cold, cool, warm, hot ii. Humidity (e.g., 60%) iii. Pressure iv. Wind (calm, breezy, windy) b. Add photo or video 4- Example tweets: a. #twrain2nasa rain, heavy, temp 75F, windy b. #twrain2nasa hail, baseball size, very cold c. #twrain2nasa sunny, temp 80F, calm B. Geolocation of tweet - Choose one of the following three options: 1- Geo-tag your tweet: This functionality is part of Twitter. In composing your tweet, select a location from the list presented. Or, enter a location in the search box. The sent tweet will contain only the bounding polygon (in lat-lon) corresponding to the specified location. 2- Include the location in your tweet, e.g., #twrain2nasa rain, heavy, Annapolis downtown MD 3- Temporarily turn on your GPS location, send your tweet (with exact lat-lon), turn off GPS.

Responses from “active” participants   #edumdcsp #twrain2nasa #mping2nasa Nov. 2017 11 17 1,159 Jan. 2018 62 6 304

Enriching the Twitter stream #mping2nasa (“active”) scientist random people local news amateur weather station “passive” #edumdcsp (“active”) #twrain2nasa (“active”) #umbrella4gpm (“active”) mPING reports Students @NASA_GESDISC followers Umbrella-as-gauge #futurehashtag (“active”) Future sources, … Enriching the Twitter stream #fb2nasa (“active”) Facebook weather reports Mention CoCoRaHS (Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow Network) And, of course, GLOBE (Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment)

mPING (retrieve reports) (Meteorological Phenomena Identification Near the Ground) Request Successful {     "count": 2,      "previous": null,      "results": [         {             "category": "Hail",              "obtime": "2017-10-03T02:17:00Z",              "description": "Pea (0.25 in.)",              "description_id": 13,              "geom": {                 "type": "Point",                  "coordinates": [                     -95.108694999999997,                      44.536219899999999                 ]             },              "id": 1397195         }, …

mPING (format for tweet) C:Hail T:2017-10-03T02:17:00Z G:Point,(-95.1087,44.5362) D:13 R:1397195 #mping2nasa Where C:  category T:  time G:  geom D: description ID R: Report ID #: hashtag

mPING (as tweet) {"created_at":"Fri Oct 13 13:38:07 +0000 2017","id":918833226864578560,"id_str":"918833226864578560","text":"C:Rain\/Snow T:2017-10-13T00:03:39Z G:Point,(-86.0218,30.2845) D:3 R:1401658 #mping2nasa","source":"\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/mping.ou.edu\" rel=\"nofollow\"\u003emPing precipitation measurements\u003c\/a\u003e","truncated":false,"in_reply_to_status_id":null,"in_reply_to_status_id_str":null,"in_reply_to_user_id":null,"in_reply_to_user_id_str":null,"in_reply_to_screen_name":null,"user":{"id":909778603323400192,"id_str":"909778603323400192","name":"Carlee L","screen_name":"CLmping_test","location":null,"url":null,"description":null,"translator_type":"none","protected":false,"verified":false,"followers_count":0,"friends_count":0,"listed_count":0,"favourites_count":0,"statuses_count":2,"created_at":"Mon Sep 18 13:58:16 +0000 2017","utc_offset":null,"time_zone":null,"geo_enabled":false,"lang":"en","contributors_enabled":false,"is_translator":false,"profile_background_color":"F5F8FA","profile_background_image_url":"","profile_background_image_url_https":"","profile_background_tile":false,"profile_link_color":"1DA1F2","profile_sidebar_border_color":"C0DEED","profile_sidebar_fill_color":"DDEEF6","profile_text_color":"333333","profile_use_background_image":true,"profile_image_url":"http:\/\/abs.twimg.com\/sticky\/default_profile_images\/default_profile_normal.png","profile_image_url_https":"https:\/\/abs.twimg.com\/sticky\/default_profile_images\/default_profile_normal.png","default_profile":true,"default_profile_image":false,"following":null,"follow_request_sent":null,"notifications":null},"geo":null,"coordinates":null,"place":null,"contributors":null,"is_quote_status":false,"quote_count":0,"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":0,"favorite_count":0,"entities":{"hashtags":[{"text":"mping2nasa","indices":[76,87]}],"urls":[],"user_mentions":[],"symbols":[]},"favorited":false,"retweeted":false,"filter_level":"low","lang":"en","timestamp_ms":"1507901887037"}

Enriching the Twitter stream #mping2nasa (“active”) scientist random people local news amateur weather station “passive” #edumdcsp (“active”) #twrain2nasa (“active”) #umbrella4gpm (“active”) mPING reports Students @NASA_GESDISC followers Umbrella-as-gauge #futurehashtag (“active”) Future sources, … Enriching the Twitter stream #fb2nasa (“active”) Facebook weather reports

Mention the sensitivity issue we ran into this past spring semester. AGU EOS article, “Gauging in the Rain” (http://bit.ly/2MGMnHE)

Umbrella-as-gauge Comparing rainfall measured (curve, in red) with that by a traditional rain gauge (vertical bars, in blue).

Enriching the Twitter stream #mping2nasa (“active”) scientist random people local news amateur weather station “passive” #edumdcsp (“active”) #twrain2nasa (“active”) #umbrella4gpm (“active”) mPING reports Students @NASA_GESDISC followers Umbrella-as-gauge #futurehashtag (“active”) Future sources, … Enriching the Twitter stream #fb2nasa (“active”) Facebook weather reports

Engagement w/ Active Participants “Reply” to “rain” tweet by tweeting to @NASADISC (special Twitter account created for the experiment) w/ link to rain map. Generate rain map from GPM, using NASA Giovanni* Filter and extract “rain” tweet (Oct. 7, 2016) about Hurricane Matthew. * Giovanni – Geospatial interactive Online Visualization and Analysis Infrastructure Mention Jim’s test engagements with GSE DISC Twitter followers. Mention Jim’s talk (next one up) which will go into more detail on Giovanni.

Summary Infrastructure is generic, i.e., not specific to a given measurement, social medium, or satellite mission. Multiple ways to engage potential citizen scientists to contribute and to learn. Twitter data have potential for earth science applications.

Questions?

Extras

Example tweets Relevant tweet Not relevant tweet Weather station tweet