Public responses to heatwaves in Chinese cities: A social media-based geospatial modelling approach

Abstract

Increasing exposure to heatwaves threatens public health, challenging various socioeconomic sectors in the coming decades. Prior studies mostly concentrated on the heatwaves occurring in specific regions by examining temperature durations, ignoring the fact that heatwaves typically swept across a large area. To comprehensively assess the effects of heatwaves, we jointly analyzed public attention to heatwaves using a dataset of over 10 million geo-located Weibo tweets across 321 cities in China. By considering spatial disparities, two kinds of public attention at city level, namely the number of heat-related tweets (NHTs) and the ratio of heat-related tweets (RHTs), were designed to indicate the severity and location of heatwave impacts, respectively. The heat cumulative intensity was used as a proxy for heatwaves, which exhibited more significant correlations with RHTs than NHTs. The multiscale geographically weighted regression (MGWR) model was employed to investigate the spatiotemporal variations of environment, demographic, and economic-social factors. Six city groups were clustered with MGWR coefficients that were consistent with the seven geographic subregions of China. This research provides a new perspective and methodology for public attention to heatwaves using geo-located social sensing data and highlights the need for actions to mitigate future heatwave stress in sensitive cities.