SocialDrought: A Social and News Media Driven Dataset and Analytical Platform Towards Understanding Societal Impact of Drought

Drought poses significant challenges to sustainability across various sectors in our society, leading to substantial consequences on agriculture, environments, ecosystems, public health, and socioeconomic stability. While prior work has studied the impacts of drought using professionally measured data sources, the societal perspectives of drought impacts remain largely under-explored. In this work, we present SocialDrought, a novel and comprehensive dataset to facilitate research on the societal impacts of drought. In particular, SocialDrought consists of three major components: 1) over 1.5 million social media posts, 2) over 1,400 news articles collected and verified by domain experts, and 3) over 31,000 meteorological records from the U.S. Drought Monitor about drought severity. In addition, we also introduce an online platform for interactive and real-time data exploration for timely insights about the societal impacts of drought. Our interdisciplinary dataset integrates both conventional meteorological data and unconventional social and news media data to provide a  holistic understanding of drought impacts. SocialDrought enables new opportunities to study the societal impacts of drought through the lens of social and news media. This work represents an important step toward improving policy-making and mitigation strategies in response to the critical challenges posed by drought and other environmental issues.