Towards multimodal geospatial reasoning: a foundation model approach for disaster detection from social media, news, and weather data

Abstract The timely detection of disasters is essential for effective emergency response. Traditional satellite-based monitoring provides accurate hazard observations but suffers from acquisition delays and weather-dependent imaging conditions. Therefore, recent research increasingly uses rapidly available digital data such as social media, news, and weather observations. However, most approaches analyse these sources in isolation and lack standardised evaluation. We address this gap using a gri