Carolina Weather Group

NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS) has provided manual translations of weather forecasts and warnings in Spanish for the past 30 years, but now the agency has a new tool to be more accurate, efficient and equitable.  Through a series of pilot projects over the past few years, NWS forecasters have been training artificial intelligence (AI) software for weather, water and climate terminology in Spanish and Simplified Chinese, the most common languages in the United States after English. NWS will add Samoan and Vietnamese next, and more languages in the future.  Two of the nearly dozen locations where these AI-translated severe weather bulletins are being tested are in the Carolinas. This week, James Brierton talks with Chris Rohrbach, a meteorologist and web developer at the National Weather Service in Columbia, South Carolina, where this artificial intelligence experiment is being tested alongside locations such as Greenville-Spartanburg, SC. You’re invited to try out the translated severe weather bulletins