Fukushima Tweets, Radiation Cloud visualized over time [MAP]

Here’s a pretty fascinating animated graphic from socialintensity.org. The graphic shows two things: radiation intensity and ‘social intensity.’ But because I’m not a huge fan of the Japan radiation cloud graphic, I’d like to post the maker’s description of how it was made:

The data for the Radioactive cloud was obtained from The Austrian Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics, where Dr.Gerhard Wottawa commented: “The images show the multi-day spread of a plume released from The Fukushima Daiichi NPP. There is assumed to be a continuous release of Iodine-131 into the atmosphere between the surface and 250 meters. Since the release has decreased after 25 March 2011, we do not assume any larger-scale health impacts.” (My emphasis, RM)

Personally I don’t think you can make any assumptions when dealing with data in a crisis situation, so I don’t place much weight in the cloud component of this graphic. But there is no denying that graphics similar to this were out there shortly after the earthquake, they were being highlighted by mainstream media, and they did cause reactions. And those reactions were very real, even though radiations levels outside the exclusion zone were very low and practically harmless.

If you have a look at the timeline above, you can view which nations were sending Twitter messages about Fukushima and radiation most intensely. Of course, the frequency of their tweeting depends on a huge number of variables, but nevertheless these two sets of data make for an interesting contrast.

It’s undeniably that people were concerned after the quake. Here’s another graphic that I made yesterday showing the sudden flow of people leaving the country in the week after March 11.