This work presents an analysis of tweets related to heat waves occurred in Italy in summer 2015. Social media offer new opportunities to indirectly measure the impact of heat waves on society. Tweets related to heat conditions were retrieved and analysed for main features. The daily volume of users and messages was a valuable indicator of heat wave impact in urban areas. The volume of tweets in certain locations was used to estimate thresholds of local discomfort conditions.

This paper presents the educational activities on meteorology carried out by LaMMA Consortium, official weather service for Tuscany. Since 2011 every year more than 1200 students come to visit LaMMA to follow one of the proposed modules. Students have also the opportunity to visit the LaMMA weather operations room and meet the forecasters. Furthermore, an educational module on climate change based on a participatory approach was proposed to more than 500 teachers in the last two years.

Twitter has proved to be an important source of information during emergencies. In Twitter hashtags are used by users to improve information retrieval and coordinate conversations. A set of 20 hashtags to be used during weather warnings was proposed in Italy in 2014. This study presents a one-year monitoring of the Italian codified hashtags. Different regional contexts are presented and main findings are discussed. Institutions have a crucial role in the stable adoption of a codified hashtag.