Model of integrating social media data and meteorological data for flood crisis situational awareness

Abstract

A flood disaster is the most disastrous hydrological event that can lead to property destruction and loss of lives. Malaysia is one of the countries that face flood disasters every year, which have caused billions of damages and loss of lives. One of the efforts to mitigate the impact is by providing advanced technology in monitoring and event alerts in disaster management. One of the ways to increase disaster management efficiency is by enhancing the situational awareness of the disaster. This study aimed to propose a model that can integrate social media data with meteorological data to improve the situational awareness of flood disasters and effectively communicate flood hazards between communities and authorities. The experimental research design methodology was adopted to design, develop, and evaluate the proposed model. The study first investigated the current standard operating procedure of flood disaster management and continued by studying the features of the social media data that can be employed in this research. Inferential statistic, ANOVA, was used to evaluate and analyse the results. The main contribution of this study is a proposed model comprising four major components: crisis alert, flood awareness, general services, and communication. Findings revealed that all four main components proposed in the model of this study are effective for technology integration in enhancing situational awareness of flood events. The proposed model was validated through a prototype design, which was assessed through usability evaluation. Findings confirmed that the proposed model has the highest mean values for Crisis, Flood Awareness, General Services and Social Media Usage characteristics which is meant that it’s been chosen the most by users indicating that the proposed model is capable in providing reliable information during flood crisis as well as enhancing the situational awareness of the event. Further findings of this study also confirmed that there is a significant difference between the component and each platform evaluated. This research has successfully shown that enhancing situational awareness can be one of the ways to mitigate the effect of the flood crisis, and it can be done by integrating social media data with meteorological data, which the main initiative is to include the community in the disaster management. This research has successfully achieved its aim, which is to enhance the situational awareness of flood crises and provide effective communication towards flood hazards through social media data integrated with meteorological data.