Drought Social Media Doesn’t Have to Be Dry

Drought Social Media Doesn’t Have to Be Dry

Greg Hammer, NOAA NCEI; Richard Heim, NOAA NCEI; Jennifer Fulford, Innovative Consulting and Management Services, LLC, and NOAA NCEI; Andrea Andersen, Innovative Consulting and Management Services, LLC, and NOAA NCEI

How is drought affecting your neighborhood? We ask our audiences on social media this question each week as we report on U.S. drought conditions. Though drought can often lack immediacy, drought consistently captures the attention of a broad audience. Why? We’ll outline the ways NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) uses social media to take a “dry” subject and give it a higher profile.

Portions of the U.S. have continually experienced drought since the U.S. Drought Monitor (USDM) began in 1999. The USDM has become the primary drought reporting portal, led by a consortium of organizations, including NOAA NCEI. Each week, NCEI combines a web story, Facebook, and Twitter posts to inform the public of recent drought through states, regions, the contiguous U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and more recently, the U.S. Affiliated Pacific Islands and U.S. Virgin Islands.

As drought monitoring has expanded, so have our communication efforts. For example, we also now share information about the monthly North American Drought Monitor (NADM), which began in 2002. Additionally, drought reporting around the globe is poised to expand in the near future. As it does, we will expand our communication efforts to include it, as appropriate.

Because drought can affect human health, people’s quality of life, wildfire, agri-business, water availability, and farm-based economies, the subject has persistent importance. We have elevated timely drought information by using several methods that could be applied to other subjects related to climate and weather:

• Regular, plain language summaries of conditions
• Social media posts that highlight regions, states, territories, and countries
• Drought animations
• Recognition of milestones
• Interactive prompts
• Infographics
• Improvements with social media trends and tools
• Multilingual tweets