AIFoPa-2026-0003
Date of Record: 06 Jan 2026
3 min read
Whata Bod Would Be Calmer
The National Weather Service posted a wind forecast for two Idaho towns. Neither town exists. One was a real town, relocated and renamed.
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. Whata Bod, to the south, would be calmer.
Orangeotild does not exist. Whata Bod does not exist.
Several other towns on the map were misspelled past the point of legibility. Names had been transposed across distances of hundreds of miles. One commenter worked out that Orangeotild was the system’s rendering of Grangeville, a real town located nowhere near where the label appeared.
The system had not merely invented names. It scrambled the names of real places and moved them across the state. It filled the gaps with new words. One publication observed that they sounded less like communities with zip codes than like an old-timey dirty joke.
The National Weather Service confirmed that the map was produced using generative AI. The post was deleted on Monday. That was 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. The spokesperson described the incident as uncommon. The agency would continue evaluating AI use and discontinue it in scenarios where it was not effective. It did not specify how those scenarios would be identified.
This was not the first such incident. In November 2025 the Rapid City office in South Dakota posted a wind map with misspelled locations. One photograph of it showed a visible Google Gemini logo. The NWS did not confirm whether that map was AI-generated. The Bureau records that this is a different thing from a denial.
The service has in recent years adopted AI for advanced forecasting models, some of which have shown genuine promise in peer-reviewed research. A forecast is only useful if a resident can locate himself within it. The citizens of Whata Bod, wherever they are, if they are, are entitled to the same guidance as everybody else.