Meteorologists at Peachtree City's National Weather Service facility are teaching the new NOAA Weather Radio to "speak Georgian."

Carlos Garza, meteorologist in charge, says the "computer voice" on the new, faster warning system "is not as good as a human voice," and must be programmed to pronounce place names as they are said in the area the radio covers.

He cited specific examples of the computer's difficulties names like "House-ton" County instead of Hew-ston (as in Texas), and in particular "Tolliver" County, actually spelled "Taliaferro." Matt Sena demonstrated the "tweaking" technique by using the town of Zebulon, which the computer initially read as "Zeeble-on."

Sena said he would have the list of hundreds of names into the system by next week. Meanwhile, Garza said, "People have called about the computer voice, giving all sorts of locales and nationalities they think it sounds like."

The new voice, while it may require some adjustment by listeners, could mean the difference in life and death for those listeners, Garza added. Under the old radio warning system, meteorologists would have to voice-record warnings and watches, then manually punch the buttons to send the messages to affected locations. The system could take as much as five minutes to get information out, he said.

With the new "Console Replacement System," everything is done by computer, with review for accuracy by the meteorologists. The new system broadcasts continuously and can call out warnings sometimes in less than a minute.

"That can definitely be the difference in whether people get to shelter in time, in event of a severe storm or tornado," Garza said.

The Peachtree City location at Falcon Field is one of the larger weather-service offices of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It also houses the river-forecasting staff for the entire southeast, Garza noted. An ominously dark "rainfall map" from 1994's tropical-storm rains, which caused extensive flooding in western and southern Georgia, hangs in the river-forecast center.

The new computerized radio system also has the advantage of automatically "cleaning up" warning broadcasts, Garza said. Standard, routine messages that used to be "manually" removed for an emergency warning, and then re-entered, are now done routinely by the computer. Local personnel went to six-week, college level classes in Norman, Okla., to learn the system, and then received more training at the local office from the installers of the system and software.

Garza has been head of the local office since 1982, when the weather service was located at the Atlanta airport. The Peachtree City facility opened in 1994.

Sena commented that the pronunciation work with the computer is time-consuming but sometimes interesting, frustrating and even fun.