From January 22–24, 2016, a major blizzard produced up to 3 ft (91 cm) of snow in parts of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast United States. I live in Raleigh, NC which also saw its fair share of snowfall. Internet was down for one day but when it came back on I started collecting tweets referring to the blizzard.
I wanted to see where are the tweets coming from. So I searched for tweets containing mentions of stormjonas, blizzard2016, jonas, blizzard, snowzilla. I ran the script for a around 10-12 hours and managed to collect around 4k tweets from all over the world. The number of tweets is less since geo tagged tweets are far less in number than regular tweets.
The data required some cleaning and sorting according to the location. There were tweets from all over the world but most of them from the United States, naturally.
Let's start with tweets from the United States. On sorting the data I saw that there were tweets from all states including Hawaii and Alaska. I wish I collected the text from the tweets to get the general idea about what each state was talking about. Anyways, I plotted each unique location on the map and this is how it looks.
There are lots of tweets around the north eastern states which were battered by the snow. The density decreases as we move left. There is some activity on the west coast. I wonder what are they talking about. Either about the excellent sunny weather they have throughout the year or about how they could have easily used an extra holiday.
The state of New York received record snowfall too. Let's compare the average snowfall in each borough against the number of tweets from each borough.
The number of tweets from Manhattan is the most while it received the least snowfall on average. Though the average snowfall in each borough is almost the same, Staten Island got hit the most. While having hardly any tweets from there. (Source).
According to this article the top 6 snowfall receiving states are given below and then is the number of tweets from each state sorted descendingly.
About a 100 tweets came from the United Kingdom. This was mostly due to reports that the blizzard was headed over to the UK from USA. (Source).
Here you can see tweets coming from all over the world. Majority from the US and Europe.
I wish I had collected the text of the tweets to see the sentiment of the tweets from different states. I presented some of the ideas I had. Would add more as and when I can think of more. Comments and suggestions are welcome!
All the code can be found over here.
The data required some cleaning and sorting according to the location. There were tweets from all over the world but most of them from the United States, naturally.
Let's start with tweets from the United States. On sorting the data I saw that there were tweets from all states including Hawaii and Alaska. I wish I collected the text from the tweets to get the general idea about what each state was talking about. Anyways, I plotted each unique location on the map and this is how it looks.
There are lots of tweets around the north eastern states which were battered by the snow. The density decreases as we move left. There is some activity on the west coast. I wonder what are they talking about. Either about the excellent sunny weather they have throughout the year or about how they could have easily used an extra holiday.
The state of New York received record snowfall too. Let's compare the average snowfall in each borough against the number of tweets from each borough.
The number of tweets from Manhattan is the most while it received the least snowfall on average. Though the average snowfall in each borough is almost the same, Staten Island got hit the most. While having hardly any tweets from there. (Source).
According to this article the top 6 snowfall receiving states are given below and then is the number of tweets from each state sorted descendingly.
 |
| Avg Snowfall in inches |
 |
| Number of tweets from each state |
West Virginia which received the highest snowfall does not even make the list. While California which received no snow had considerable amount of tweets.
Here you can see tweets coming from all over the world. Majority from the US and Europe.
I wish I had collected the text of the tweets to see the sentiment of the tweets from different states. I presented some of the ideas I had. Would add more as and when I can think of more. Comments and suggestions are welcome!
All the code can be found over here.
