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 Monday, 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.

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.

Read the full article about the National Weather Service's translations by Ayurella Horn-Muller at Grist.