We study collective attention paid towards hurricanes through the lens of $n$-grams on Twitter, a social media platform with global reach. Using hurricane name mentions as a proxy for awareness, we find that the exogenous temporal dynamics are remarkably similar across storms, but that overall collective attention varies widely even among storms causing comparable deaths and damage. We construct `hurricane attention maps' and observe that hurricanes causing deaths on (or economic damage to) the continental United States generate substantially more attention in English language tweets than those that do not. We find that a hurricane's Saffir-Simpson wind scale category assignment is strongly associated with the amount of attention it receives. Higher category storms receive higher proportional increases of attention per proportional increases in number of deaths or dollars of damage, than lower category storms. The most damaging and deadly storms of the 2010s, Hurricanes Harvey and Maria, generated the most attention and were remembered the longest, respectively. On average, a category 5 storm receives 4.6 times more attention than a category 1 storm causing the same number of deaths and economic damage.

中文翻译：

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飓风和主题标签：表征在线对自然灾害的集体关注

我们通过推特（一个具有全球影响力的社交媒体平台）上 $n$-gram 的镜头研究对飓风的集体关注。使用飓风名称提及作为意识的代理，我们发现外源时间动态在风暴中非常相似，但整体集体注意力差异很大，即使在造成类似死亡和破坏的风暴中也是如此。我们构建了“飓风注意力地图”，并观察到在美国大陆造成死亡（或经济损失）的飓风在英语推文中比那些没有引起注意的飓风要多得多。我们发现飓风的 Saffir-Simpson 风标类别分配与其受到的关注量密切相关。与较低类别的风暴相比，较高类别的风暴在死亡人数或损失金额按比例增加时获得更高比例的关注。2010 年代最具破坏性和致命性的飓风哈维和玛丽亚分别引起了最多的关注和最长的记忆。平均而言，5 类风暴受到的关注是造成相同死亡人数和经济损失的 1 类风暴的 4.6 倍。