Regional geographical and climatic environments affect urban rainstorm perception sensitivity across China

Abstract

Extreme weather events become more frequent in the context of global climate change. Understanding how the public sense and perceive extreme weather events such as rainstorms is crucial for rainstorm-induced hazard mitigation. However, it is not clear how public's rainstorm perception and sensitivity vary across a large geographic scale. In this study, we examined over 210 million microblogs and studied rainstorm perception and perception sensitivity across China in 2017. Our results show that, on average, when the rainstorm-derived rainfall increase 1 mm, city dwellers would post 0.178 more rainstorm-related microblogs. There are also significant variations in rainstorm perception sensitivity across our study area. Dwellers living in the cities in the southeastern coast are not as sensitive to rainstorms as those in the north. Such spatial variations could be explained by annual rainfall and terrain relief variables. Dwellers who live in cities with annual rainfall less than 839 mm and terrain relief greater than 264 m show more attention to rainstorms by posting more microblogs.