During Sandy, Flickr Uploads Mirrored Atmospheric Pressure
Hurricane Sandy's Damage To New Jersey Coast Wikimedia Commons During Hurricane Sandy, people took to the streets (or at least peeked out the window), documenting the storm on social media, uploading images and updates of the destruction. On Flickr, a new paper in Scientific Reports finds, the rate of those uploads mirrored the swift drop in atmospheric pressure in New Jersey as the hurricane made landfall. Between Oct. 20 and Nov. 20, 2012, 32 million pictures were uploaded to Flickr with the tags "Hurricane Sandy," "hurricane" and "sandy." The uploads peaked during the hour that Sandy made landfall near Atlantic City, New Jersey. At the same time, atmospheric pressure in the area bottomed out. The researchers, from Boston University, University College London and the University of Warwick in the U.K., charted the "striking correlation" between the number of photos uploaded and the...