Seunghui Choi attended Hydrology days 2025 and is a visiting researcher at Uppsala University. Read her blog post below:
Drought Beyond Water Deficits:
Hydrological Change, Emotional Framing, and Risk Communication
Drought is often described as a creeping phenomenon. Unlike floods or hurricanes, it does not arrive with an obvious shock. Instead, it unfolds gradually through reduced precipitation, declining soil moisture, and falling streamflow, quietly accumulating impacts over time. While its physical progression can be measured with increasing precision, the social and psychological consequences of drought are far less visible, yet equally consequential.
Traditionally, drought monitoring systems have focused on physical indicators: meteorological drought driven by precipitation deficits, agricultural drought reflected in soil moisture stress, and hydrological drought characterized by reduced streamflow and groundwater levels (Hao et al., 2017). These indicators are essential for understanding water availability. However, they do not fully capture how societies experience drought when people begin to perceive risk, how they emotionally respond, and how those perceptions shape behavior.
Drought as a Social Process
The social impacts of drought have often been examined through surveys, interviews, or social modeling frameworks that focus on specific stakeholder groups. While these approaches provide valuable insights, they offer only a partial picture of how drought risk is communicated and perceived at the community or societal scale. In real-world settings, risk perception is not formed in isolation. Rather, it emerges through interactions among individuals, media, and institutions.
In recent years, the concept of “human social sensors” has been proposed to bridge this gap (Galesic et al., 2021). This approach treats digital trace data, such as internet search queries, social media posts, and news coverage, as indirect signals of collective attention, cognition, and emotion. When combined with physical drought indicators, these data allow researchers to examine drought as a coupled physical–social system.
The 2022–2023 Drought in South Korea: Interplay of various media (Choi and Liu et al., 2025)
The 2022–2023 drought in South Korea provides a compelling example of how physical drought conditions and social responses can diverge. Using the self-calibrating Effective Drought Index (scEDI; Park et al., 2022), daily changes in drought characteristics were monitored and compared with multiple forms of social monitoring data, including internet search activity, Twitter/X posts, and news article headlines.
The results reveal distinct patterns. During June 2022, when drought conditions were widespread across the country, public attention was high across all platforms. Internet search volumes, the number of drought-related news articles, and social media activity peaked simultaneously, indicating strong nationwide awareness.
In contrast, when drought conditions intensified again during February–March 2023, particularly in the southwestern region, social responses differed. Local news outlets increased drought-related reporting, and internet search activity rose concurrently. However, Twitter/X activity remained relatively low. Despite severe local drought conditions, social media discourse did not increase proportionally.
These results indicate that public attention and communication patterns vary depending on the spatial extent of drought. When drought is nationwide, attention across media platforms is synchronized. When drought becomes localized, attention persists in local news outlets and information-seeking behavior but does not necessarily translate into increased social media activity.
Emotional Signals in Media and Social Platforms
Beyond volume-based indicators, emotional tone provides deeper insight into how drought is framed and perceived. Sentiment analysis of news headlines and Twitter/X posts reveals contrasting patterns between platforms.
Negative Twitter/X posts exhibited different dominant emotion types depending on whether drought conditions were national or regional, suggesting that emotional expression on social media is sensitive to spatial context. In contrast, the emotional framing of news headlines remained relatively consistent across drought phases.
Notably, negative news headlines increased as drought developed slowly. This pattern suggests that local news outlets actively monitor emerging hydrological stress and function as early warning communicators, even before public attention escalates. Yet during these periods, both internet search activity and social media engagement remained low, indicating limited situational awareness or perceived risk among the broader public.
Learning from the Past: Historical Droughts in Ireland
To better understand whether these patterns are unique to the digital era, ongoing research extends the analysis to historical droughts in Ireland using the Irish News Archive (1850–2010) and the Irish Drought Impact Database (Jobbová et al., 2024).
Source: Smithsonian magazine (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/drought-reveals-giant-4500-year-old-irish-henge-180969650/)
Ireland’s long-term precipitation records and rich archival media data provide a rare opportunity to examine how drought severity and impact types shape emotional framing over time. Analysis shows that as drought conditions progressed from moderate to severe and extreme, the proportion and intensity of fear-related emotions in news articles increased markedly.
Importantly, emotional framing varied by impact type. Articles focused on agriculture and livestock farming often combined sadness and fear, reflecting economic loss and long-term livelihood concerns. In contrast, news articles related to public water supply were strongly associated with fear and response-oriented framing, emphasizing urgency and immediate societal risk.
These findings underscore that drought is not communicated as a single, uniform hazard. Instead, its emotional meaning depends on how it intersects with critical systems—food production, water supply, and public welfare.
Media Framing and Drought Risk Communication
Taken together, the South Korean and Irish cases suggest that drought risk communication is highly platform-dependent and context-sensitive. Physical drought indicators may signal escalating risk, but social responses depend on how that risk is framed, localized, and emotionally charged.
News media appear to play a crucial role in identifying and communicating emerging drought risks, often before widespread public engagement occurs. Social media and search behavior, meanwhile, reflect perceived relevance and immediacy rather than hydrological severity alone.
This divergence has important implications for drought preparedness and resilience. Early warning systems that rely solely on physical indicators may miss opportunities to engage the public.
Toward Integrated Drought Monitoring
Drought is fundamentally a hydrological phenomenon, but its impacts unfold through social systems. Understanding drought risk therefore requires integrating physical monitoring with social sensing, tracking not only how water availability changes, but also how people search, communicate, and emotionally respond.
By combining drought indices with digital trace data and historical media analysis, we gain a richer picture of drought as both a water crisis and a communication challenge. Such integrated approaches can help identify gaps between physical risk and public awareness, ultimately supporting more effective, timely, and socially attuned drought risk communication. In an era of increasing climate variability, recognizing drought as both a hydrological and social process is no longer optional. It is essential for building resilient communities.
References
Hao, Z., Yuan, X., Xia, Y., Hao, F., & Singh, V. P. (2017). An Overview of Drought Monitoring and Prediction Systems at Regional and Global Scales. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 98(9), 1879-1896. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-15-00149.1
Galesic, M., Bruine de Bruin, W., Dalege, J., Feld, S. L., Kreuter, F., Olsson, H., Prelec, D., Stein, D. L., & van der Does, T. (2021). Human social sensing is an untapped resource for computational social science. Nature, 595(7866), 214-222. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03649-2
Park, C.-K., Kam, J., Byun, H.-R., & Kim, D.-W. (2022). A self-calibrating effective drought index (scEDI): Evaluation against social drought impact records over the Korean Peninsula (1777–2020). Journal of Hydrology, 613, 128357. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2022.128357
Choi, S., Liu, A., Lee, S., Yoon, H., & Kam, J. (2025). The interplay of news media, social media, and public search behavior during the 2022–2023 South Korea drought. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-06398-z
Jobbová, E., Crampsie, A., Murphy, C., Ludlow, F., McLeman, R., Horvath, C., Seifert, N., Myslinski, T., & Sente, L. (2024). The Irish drought impacts database: A 287-year database of drought impacts derived from newspaper archives. Geoscience Data Journal, 11(4), 1007-1023. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1002/gdj3.272
