The Invading Sea
  • News
  • Commentary
  • Multimedia
  • Public opinion
  • About
No Result
View All Result
The Invading Sea
  • News
  • Commentary
  • Multimedia
  • Public opinion
  • About
No Result
View All Result
The Invading Sea
No Result
View All Result

The National Weather Service is once again translating lifesaving alerts. What happened?

Political pressures may have driven the federal agency to backtrack on its decision to suspend automated translations

by Ayurella Horn-Muller
May 8, 2025
in News
0

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

By Ayurella Horn-Muller, Grist

At the beginning of last month, the National Weather Service, or NWS, discontinued its automated emergency-weather translation services in Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog and Samoan. The agency had decided not to renew its contract with Lilt, an AI-translation platform.

Then, just about three weeks after the contract lapsed, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, of which the NWS is a subagency, shared an update: The automated translation services would be back up and running as of April 28.

The agency’s back-and-forth turned April into a monthlong test case: How would communities around the U.S. fare without adequate information during extreme weather events?

In the span of a single week, belts of Louisiana were battered by flash flooding, while severe storms brought deadly hail and heavy rain to parts of Oklahoma and Texas, and a succession of destructive tornadoes touched down in nine states. Alarms flashed across screens and blared on radios warning people to get to safety. Many of those messages, however, were issued only in English.

The National Hurricane Center is co-located with the Miami National Weather Service Forecast Office on the main campus of Florida International University in Miami. (NHC/NOAA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
The National Hurricane Center is co-located with the Miami National Weather Service Forecast Office on the main campus of Florida International University in Miami. (NHC/NOAA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

One thing that’s certain is that the increasing frequency and strength, due to climate change, of these events will make life harder for people everywhere. NOAA’s decision sparked an uproar across the country, as advocates and policymakers spoke out against the Trump administration — and the millions of people it put at undue risk.

Monica Bozeman, who leads the National Weather Service’s automated language translations, told Grist that the agency’s contract with Lilt has been renewed for another year. A week after NOAA’s update, however, that restoration is still underway. “We are in the process of standing back up the last few translation sites,” said Bozeman.

The agency confirmed that Lilt’s software will once again generate translations for 30 of its regional weather forecast offices throughout the nation, in addition to the National Hurricane Center. The Lilt models automatically translate urgent updates and warnings from the NWS, which are then posted on websites like weather.gov and hurricanes.gov, and voiced over NOAA’s weather radio. The agency is still “working to restart AI translations,” said Bozeman, to populate those websites and broadcasts.

“The NWS is committed to enhancing the accessibility of vital, lifesaving weather information by making urgent weather alerts available to the public in multiple languages,” Bozeman said. “Utilizing artificial intelligence allows us to keep up with this level of demand.”

When asked about the NWS shuttering radio translations in the southern region, as previously first reported by Grist, Bozeman said the agency is “working to turn on that capability for the NOAA Weather Radio to broadcast the translated information coming from Lilt AI translations at the affected sites.”

Neither Bozeman nor a national NOAA spokesperson addressed Grist’s requests for further information.

For instance, the agency has remained tight-lipped about why translation services were suspended in the first place and has not clarified why it moved to reinstate the contract. It also did not provide a timeline on when to expect all stalled translations to be restored to their former capacity or address whether the ongoing workforce cuts have impeded progress. Representatives from Lilt did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

Analysts say the reasons for the initial decision may be linked to what they see as the administration’s “act first, ask questions later” approach to policy. Public response is also likely to have helped propel the weather agency’s sudden backtrack.

“What I’m noticing with this administration is a huge trend where certain pressures really work on them when it comes to walking back the things that they’re doing,” said Priya Pandey, a policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy. Those include economic levers, as seen with tariffs, she noted, as well as the court of public opinion. “Republican Congress members that have some of these weather centers in their districts were putting pressure on the administration to look into this and look into the impacts of the rollbacks on NOAA.”

The New York Times reported that as of May 2, about 10% of the weather service’s total staff have been terminated or accepted buyout offers. Now it appears that more turbulence is in store for the agency: President Donald Trump’s budget proposal includes significant cuts to NOAA’s budget and the dismantling of its research arm. Five former NWS leaders wrote in a letter dated Friday that they feared the cuts would lead to understaffing in weather forecast offices and “needless loss of life.”

Vehicles line up on a hurricane evacuation route. (iStock image)
Vehicles line up on a hurricane evacuation route. (iStock image)

With the exceptions of New York and Hawaiʻi, which mandate their own statewide emergency translation services, few other states have adopted similar comprehensive models enforcing multilingual information accessibility in the event of a disaster.

Pandey thinks that could very well change, as the federal government’s anti-immigrant approach could prompt some states to adopt their own inclusive emergency management policies while also ramping up the need for community-led efforts.

The executive order that Trump signed in March that designated English as the country’s official language and rescinded a Clinton-era mandate for federally funded agencies and entities to provide language aid to non-English speakers, said Pandey, “doesn’t prohibit people from translating things outright.”

Still, she noted, the order does make what used to be a prerequisite entirely voluntary and provides government institutions such as the NWS or NOAA, in addition to state and county-level emergency management operations, the ability to “outright ignore providing translations.”

In the days following the initial announcement from the NWS, the Nebraska Commission on Latino-Americans doubled down on its commitment to provide translated extreme weather alerts to residents statewide. Executive Director María Arriaga told Grist the “pivotal” decision exposed how vulnerable non-English-speaking communities become “when translation infrastructure disappears overnight” and pushed the commission into action.

They’ve since accelerated conversations with state agencies to develop the framework for a multilingual emergency information plan, initially serving Spanish speakers, with the goal to also support residents who speak K’iche’, Arabic and Vietnamese.

“While we are not a weather agency, we step in as a connector, disseminating accurate and timely information where we see that essential communication is missing or inaccessible,” said Arriaga. “Language should never be a barrier when lives are at stake.”

Kate Yoder contributed reporting to this story. This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/extreme-weather/the-national-weather-service-reinstated-translation-alerts-what-happened/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.

Sign up for The Invading Sea newsletter by visiting here. To support The Invading Sea, click here to make a donation. If you are interested in submitting an opinion piece to The Invading Sea, email Editor Nathan Crabbe at ncrabbe@fau.edu. 

Tags: language translationNational Oceanic and Atmospheric AdministrationNational Weather Serviceweather alerts
Previous Post

Florida farms need more than compensation: Anti-PFAS legislation and the Relief for Farmers Hit with PFAS Act 

Next Post

How and where is nuclear waste stored in the US?

Next Post
A wipe sample is taken to measure contamination levels on the outside of a waste drum. (IAEA Imagebank, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

How and where is nuclear waste stored in the US?

Twitter Facebook Instagram Youtube

About this website

The Invading Sea is a nonpartisan source for news, commentary and educational content about climate change and other environmental issues affecting Florida. The site is managed by Florida Atlantic University’s Center for Environmental Studies in the Charles E. Schmidt College of Science.

 

 

Sign up for The Invading Sea newsletter

Sign up to receive the latest climate change news and commentary in your email inbox by visiting here.

Donate to The Invading Sea

We are seeking continuing support for the website and its staff. Click here to learn more and donate.

Calendar of past posts

May 2025
S M T W T F S
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031
« Apr   Jun »

© 2022 The Invading Sea

No Result
View All Result
  • News
  • Commentary
  • Multimedia
  • Public opinion
  • About

© 2022 The Invading Sea

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In