Responses to heat waves: what can Twitter data tell us?

Increasing average temperatures and heat waves have devasting impacts on human health and well-being but studies on heat impacts and how people adapt are rare and often confined to specific locations. In this study we aimed to explore how social media data can be used to generate knowledge about how people feel about heat waves through an analysis of their conversations. We collected global Twitter data over two months (January and February 2022) using predefined hashtags about heatwaves. Topic modelling revealed five clusters of which three were related to communications about climate change related heat, covering 76% of all tweets. These three clusters included one on the impacts of heat and heatwaves (34%), one on perceptions of weather and heat (28%) and one on extreme weather and climate change (14%). The remaining 24% of tweets were on sport events or films and music. The number of tweets in each week corresponded well with major heat wave occurrences in Argentina, Australia and India, indicating that people are aware of the threat from heat and its impacts on the society, although not much could be learned in terms of personal coping and preparedness strategies. Apart from the content of tweets, a great deal could be learned in terms of how people engaged with Twitter tweets about heat or heat waves. We found that tweets posted early, and which were shared by other influential Twitter users, were among the most popular. Finally, we found that the most popular tweets belonged to individual scientists or respected news outlets, with no evidence of wide-spread misinformation about climate change related heat.