Yesterday’s San Francisco storm made it rain — tweets, that is

The San Francisco Bay Area experienced the closest thing to a snow day it’s ever seen yesterday. But while the Pineapple Express storm caused school and business closures, traffic mayhem, electricity blackouts, and floods, we also got a flood of something else: tweets — more than 80,000 of them.

Twitter’s data team kept tabs on storm-related activity in the past couple of days and created a map of tweets with the hashtags #hellastorm, #bayareastorm, and #stormageddon. It also mapped out tweets about rain and snow around the country from roughly the same time period.

Check out these cool visualizations of storms through tweets:

According to a Twitter spokesperson, people use social media during natural disasters for four reasons: to check in with family and friends, for emotional support and healing, to determine disaster magnitude, and to provide firsthand disaster accounts.