“It could be worse, it could be raining”: Reliable automatic meteorological forecasting for holiday planning

Abstract

Weather forecasting is a logical process that consists in evaluating the predictions provided by a set of stochastic models, compare these and take a conclusion about the weather in a given area and a given interval of time. Meteorological forecasting provides reliable predictions about the weather within a given interval of time. The automation of the forecasting process would be helpful in a number of contexts. For instance, when forecasting about underpopulated or small geographic areas is out of the human forecasters’ tasks but is central, e.g., for tourism. In this paper, we start to deal with these challenging tasks by developing a defeasible reasoner for meteorological forecasting, which we evaluate against a real-world example with applications to tourism and holiday planning.