Severe Weather? Tweet! Earthquake? Tweet!

The National Weather Service is using Twitter’s new geo-tagging capabilities to gather information on storms, ReadWriteWeb reported, while the U.S. Geological Survey is more concerned with tremors and earthquakes, saying the microblogging service is the quickest way to inform people about them, according to ecopolitology.

First, the weather: According to Twitter Storm Report documentation from the NWS, the system monitors tweets with the #wxreport hashtag and uses Twitter’s geo-location features or approximations of users’ locations to offer data to meteorologists.