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This article examines how Facebook is shaping the nature of hate speech. The observation field is the Facebook pages of the 18 Portuguese football clubs of the Portuguese League – the main professional competition in the country. Data extraction was performed automatically via Facebook Graph API in the first three months of the 2020/2021 season. The analysed dataset has 5,192 publications and 276,231 fan comments, which registered over 5 million reactions (like, haha, love, sad, wow, etc.). The findings reveal that the volume of hate speech material on Facebook pages has a low incidence. In any case, the most significant comments are racists, xenophobes, and regional antagonisms. These cases are also the ones that have attracted the most reactions from fans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Volcano eruption identification and watching is crucial to better understanding volcano dynamics, namely the near real-time identification of the eruption start, end, and duration. Eruption watching allows hazard assessment, eruption forecasting and warnings, and also risk mitigation during periods of unrest, to enhance public safety and reduce losses from volcanic events. The near real-time fire radiative power (FRP) product retrieved using information from the SEVIRI sensor onboard the Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) satellite are used to identify and follow up volcanic activity at the pan-European level, namely the Mount Etna and Cumbre Vieja eruptions which occurred during 2021. The FRP product is designed to record information on the location, timing, and fire radiative power output of wildfires. Measuring FRP from SEVIRI/MSG and integrating it over the lifetime of a fire provides an estimate of the total Fire Radiative Energy (FRE) released. Together with FRP data analysis, SO2 data from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) is used to assess the relationship between daily emitted concentrations of SO2 and the radiative energy released during volcanic eruptions. Results show that the FRE data allows us to evaluate the amount of energy released and is related to the pollutant concentrations from volcanic emissions during the considered events. A good agreement between FRP detection and SO2 atmospheric concentrations was found for the considered eruption occurrences. The adopted methodology, due to its simplicity and near real-time availability, shows potential to be used as a management tool to help authorities monitor and manage resources during ongoing volcanic events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mediterranean European countries, including Portugal, are considered fire-prone regions, being affected by fire events every summer. Nonetheless, Portugal has been recording large burned areas over the last 20 years, which are not only strongly associated with hot and dry conditions, but also with high fuel availability in the ecosystems. Due to recent catastrophic fire seasons, Portugal has been implementing preventive policies during the pre-fire season, which, in turn, can optimize combat strategies during the fire season. In this context, our study contributes to fire prevention by identifying the regions with the highest potential to burn. The application of a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to a range of climatological, ecological, and biophysical variables, either provided by remote sensing or reanalysis products, and known to be linked with diverse fire-vulnerability factors, allows the objective identification of the regions with the highest susceptibility to burn. The central and southernmost areas of Portugal present a stronger signal in the PCA, suggesting a likely high exposure to future fire events. The fuel accumulation over several months, in conjunction with elevation and fire weather conditions, are the terms out of the retained PCs that can explain most of the variability. The quality assessment performed for the burned areas in 2022 showed that they occurred in highly susceptible areas, highlighting the usefulness of the proposed methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]