I would have benefitted from a new AI System that’s being tested in the United Kingdom a couple weeks ago.

Computer scientists at the University of Aberdeen, UK, were asked to generate an “artificial weatherperson” by operators of offshore oil rigs, who wanted more clarity in their forecasts. The vocabulary used by different forecasters can be vague and highly variable, says Ehud Reiter, who led the Aberdeen team.

While this is simply an irritation to most of us, it can be a big headache for the offshore oil industry, where unexpected bad weather can damage equipment and threaten safety.

When Reiter and his team compared past weather bulletins with the raw forecast data on which they were based, they found a striking variability in the choice of words used by different forecasters. For instance, when they talked of “evening” weather, some meant conditions around 6 pm, while others meant much nearer midnight. “Late morning” could mean anywhere between 9 am and noon. The UK’s Met Office is also reviewing how effectively its forecasters communicate.

An imprecise weather forecast (”wave heights increasing through the afternoon”) recently resulted in myself and a friend getting caught out in 8 foot seas in a 23′ sailboat at lunchtime. We made it back in one piece, but it was the toughest sailing either of us had ever done. My buddy literally kissed the ground when we got back ashore. If the forecast had been, “wave heights increasing to 6-8 ft after 12pm,” we would never have left the harbor.