In early April, the National Weather Service said that a contract lapse prompted a pause in its automated language translation services.
The NWS partnered with software firm Lilt in 2023. It was a technological leap at the time, replacing manual translations that NWS said required much manpower.
The company's AI technology translates weather alerts from English into languages like Spanish, French, Vietnamese, simplified Chinese, and Samoan.
Some media reports said that experts believed the pause would put non-English speakers at risk of missing potentially life-saving weather warnings.
Some also think the change was made due to Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts and have cited President Donald Trump's declaration that English is the official language of the U.S.
The translations are important for more than extreme weather events, Andrew Kruczkiewicz, a senior researcher at the Columbia Climate School at Columbia University, told The Associated Press.
General weather forecasts are essential for a number of sectors including tourism, transportation and energy. Families and businesses can make more informed decisions when they can get weather information that often includes actions that should be taken based on the forecast.
Climatologist David Legates of the Cornwall Alliance says the deal with Lilt was on a trial run.
"If you look behind the curtain, you find out this was a pilot program. It had a fuse of 18 months and then ended, and that's when it was intended to end, in April. And the idea was then they were to go back and investigate what happened. This is not running nationwide. This was running in 31 of 122 National Weather Service offices."
He said the program will be evaluated to see what needs to change.
"One of the concerns that was coming up is that rote translation for example, would translate a ‘weather watch’ as in a ‘weather object that you put on your wrist.’ And so, obviously that's not the information we want to convey. When you start to try to translate this into simplified Chinese or Samoan or Vietnamese, are those people able to understand what you're trying to get across?"
Legates said he doesn't believe there's anything nefarious behind the pause of the program.
