Identifying Event Impacts by Monitoring the News Media

Assessing the potential property and social impacts of an event, such as tornado or wildfire, continues to be a challenging research area. From financial markets to disaster management to epidemiology, the importance of understanding the impacts that events create cannot be understated. Our work describes an approach to fuse information from multiple sources, then to analyze the information cycles to identify prior temporal patterns related to the impact of an event. This approach is then applied to the analysis of news reports from multiple news sources pertaining to several different natural disasters. Results show that our approach can project the severity of the impacts of certain natural disasters, such as heat waves on droughts and wild fires. In addition, results show that specific types of disaster consistently produce similar impacts when each time they occur.