Monday, 13 January 2020: 10:45 AM
252B (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
As a national and Caribbean forecaster for WeatherNation, I am sometimes tasked to use my Spanish for high-impact weather in the Caribbean and the United States. However, meteorology in the Spanish-speaking world can feature varying terminology that presents a unique challenge in communicating effective information to users.
In addition, because the Spanish-speaking world is so vast in geography - from the world's driest deserts in northern Chile to some of the lushest rain forests in Central America - there is also a wide spectrum of weather-related impacts that drastically impact. "Tormentas electricas" in Puerto Rico, for example, are rarely, if ever, seen in the cooler, temperate west coast of South America, which enjoys a similar climate to the west coast of the United States. Argentina's Pampa region can see hail and tornadoes that rival the American plains, while hail is nearly unheard of for most of the Caribbean.
Hurricanes can slam into the Caribbean and Central America, of course, while virtually all of Spanish-speaking South America has never experienced one. Here, instead, water temperatures - like the upwelling off the fishing-dependent coasts of Peru and Chile - are critical to the fragile ecosystems that sustain large parts of those countries' economies.
But the Spanish terminology gap extends to arguably the highest impact event for Latin America: Earthquakes. The terminology varies notably on what an earthquake is even called! A weaker earthquake is known as a "temblor", while a strong one is referred to by the direct translation for an earthquake, "terremoto". Inherently, there is subjectivity in terminology - does a 5.0 or greater earthquake lead to it being called a terremoto? In quake-prone Chile - home to the world's largest earthquake on record - the temblor/terremoto threshold may be as high as a 6 or even a 7.
Here in America, of course, we're also home to a wide variety of weather and climate, but terminology is largely uniform, and there is the consistency of a well-funded, well-developed national weather service acting as an umbrella.
In South America, depending on a variety of economic and impact weather reasons, national meteorological agencies vary in every aspect - alerts, terminology, and even radar coverage - mainly due to so many countries (there are 19 Spanish-speaking countries in the Americas) and, therefore, governments, economies and priorities.
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