Changes in water consumption linked to heavy news media coverage of extreme climatic events

Science Advances
Kimberly J Quesnel, Newsha K Ajami

Abstract

Public awareness of water- and drought-related issues is an important yet relatively unexplored component of water use behavior. To examine this relationship, we first quantified news media coverage of drought in California from 2005 to 2015, a period with two distinct droughts; the later drought received unprecedentedly high media coverage, whereas the earlier drought did not, as the United States was experiencing an economic downturn coinciding with a historic presidential election. Comparing this coverage to Google search frequency confirmed that public attention followed news media trends. We then modeled single-family residential water consumption in 20 service areas in the San Francisco Bay Area during the same period using geospatially explicit data and including news media coverage as a covariate. Model outputs revealed the factors affecting water use for populations of varying demographics. Importantly, the models estimated that an increase of 100 drought-related articles in a bimonthly period was associated with an 11 to 18% reduction in water use. Then, we evaluated high-resolution water consumption data from smart meters, known as advanced metering infrastructure, in one of the previously modeled service areas to ev...Continue Reading

References

Oct 20, 2012·Water Research·Anna Hurlimann, Sara Dolnicar
Sep 10, 2013·PloS One·Takayuki Mizuno, Tsutomu Watanabe
Mar 5, 2014·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Shahzeen Z Attari
Oct 23, 2014·PloS One·Sudhakar V NutiKarthik Murugiah
Mar 4, 2015·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Noah S DiffenbaughDanielle Touma
Apr 2, 2016·Science Advances·Yury KryvasheyeuManuel Cebrian

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Citations

Aug 25, 2018·Science Advances·Johanna MårdMaurizio Mazzoleni
Apr 23, 2019·Water Resources Research·M H BarendrechtG Blöschl
Dec 17, 2020·Environmental Science & Technology·Abinash BhattachanDennis P Lettenmaier
Dec 2, 2021·Water Science and Technology : a Journal of the International Association on Water Pollution Research·M J Booysen, C Ripunda
May 16, 2019··Margaret GarciaKelli Larson

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Software Mentioned

Google Trends
Google search bar
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STL ( Seasonal Decomposition of Time Series by Loess )
Google CSE
Google search
SFGate
Articulate
Google Custom Search Engine ( CSE )
BFAST

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