AIFoPa-2026-0003 — National Weather Service Posts AI-Generated Forecast Map for Idaho; Map Includes Towns "Orangeotild" and "Whata Bod," Neither of Which Exists
On a Saturday in early January 2026, the National Weather Service office in Missoula, Montana, posted a wind forecast for Camas Prairie, Idaho. The post encouraged locals to hold onto their hats. It noted that Orangeotild faced a 10% chance of high winds, while Whata Bod to the south would experience calmer conditions. This was, on its face, a routine weather advisory for a rural stretch of the American West.
The problem was geographic in nature. Orangeotild does not exist. Whata Bod does not exist. Several other towns on the map were misspelled to the point of unintelligibility, with names transposed across distances of hundreds of miles. One commenter, attempting to reverse-engineer the hallucinations, determined that Orangeotild was the AI's rendering of Grangeville — a real town located nowhere near where the label appeared. The AI had not merely invented names. It had scrambled the names of real places, relocated them across the state, and renamed the gaps with words that sounded, as one publication noted, more like an old-timey dirty joke than a community with a zip code.
The National Weather Service confirmed the map was produced using generative AI. The post was deleted on Monday — the same day the Washington Post contacted officials with questions. A spokesperson confirmed the AI had been used to generate a base map for forecast information, described the incident as uncommon, and noted that the agency would continue evaluating AI use and discontinue it in scenarios where it was not effective. The NWS did not specify how it would identify those scenarios.
This was not the first such incident. In November 2025, the Rapid City, South Dakota, office had posted a wind map with misspelled locations and, in one photograph, a visible Google Gemini logo. The NWS did not confirm whether that map was also AI-generated. The Bureau notes that this is a different kind of non-confirmation than a denial.
The NWS has in recent years embraced AI for advanced forecasting models, some of which have shown genuine promise in peer-reviewed research. The Bureau does not dispute this. The Bureau simply notes that a forecast is only useful if residents can locate themselves within it, and that the citizens of Whata Bod — wherever they are, if they are — deserve the same quality of meteorological guidance as everyone else.