NOAA Seeks Cloud-Based Machine Learning Solution for Translating Weather Forecasts Into Spanish

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration‘s Office of Central Processing is seeking machine learning solutions to translate weather forecasts into Spanish and other languages.

Currently, NOAA manually translates announcements from the National Hurricane Center Atlantic into Spanish through the National Weather Service Weather Forecast Office San Juan, according to a request for information posted on SAM .gov.

NOAA said that the manual process is unsustainable due to the amount of work involved and the San Juan office’s limited number of personnel proficient in Spanish.

To address the issue, NOAA wants to adopt a cloud-based solution due to the technology’s customization capabilities and ease of maintenance.

The cloud solution should be fit to provide on-the-fly translations of free text, documents, webpages and social media content.

All types of content must be translated using the same artificial intelligence base model and dictionary to ensure that they are uniformly translated with the same baseline material, the RFI read.

NOAA intends to use machine learning to generate “first guess” Spanish translation products that San Juan forecasters can use to save time.

The translations should be backed by expertise in social science or linguistics to ensure that warnings are perceived by the target audience as intended.

The government plans to incrementally implement a scalable translation solution that can integrate with the NWS’s existing enterprise systems.

NOAA intends to eventually expand the technology’s scope to include other NWS WFO products to benefit the largest number of Spanish-speaking citizens.

The solution is expected to serve as the foundation for translating information into languages such as Samoan, French and Tagalog.