The use of Twitter tweets that are geotagged to monitor aspects of the natural world, such as disease diffusion and phenology has been demonstrated to have potential to serve as alternative data sources. Estimates of geotagged percentage of tweets is as high as five percent, providing an interesting sample of data to monitor the diffusion perceptions. There exist several issues to address, such as the use of terminology that may not be relevant to the exact topic (e.g. the term drought being used to describe a slump in a baseball player's performance) and the quality of geotagged data for location analysis purposes. In this poster, we examine the how perceptions of drought are communicated via Twitter feeds and compare this to actual temperature and climatic data and maps. Specifically, using key words that relate to drought-influenced actions, we will map and produce a form of location-quotient to explore areas where drought-related posts are above or below a calculated mean, and then compare this to actual temperature data to understand the spatial and temporal patterns of perceptions of extreme heat and drought and what actions are being taken in response.
