weather prediction seems to me like a terrific use of machine learning aka statistics. The challenge I suppose is in the data. To get perfect predictions you'd need to have a mapping of what conditions were like 6 hours, 12 hours, etc before, and what the various outcomes were, which butterflies flapped their wings and where (this last one is a joke about how hard this data would be). Hard but not impossible. Maybe impossible. I know very little about weather data though. Is there already such a format?