After IBM and The Weather Company, I joined BreezoMeter as General Manager for North America in late 2021 — helping bring what I believed was the world’s most precise air quality intelligence platform to the US market.

We were out front on this story.

I spent much of my time at BreezoMeter making the case publicly — in media appearances, industry conferences, and briefings with healthcare and insurance executives — that air quality was a business intelligence problem, not just a public health advisory. The data existed. The forecast capability existed. What was missing was the organizational infrastructure to act on it before the emergency room filled up.

That argument felt urgent in late 2021. It feels existential in July 2026. A year after I joined, Google acquired BreezoMeter. The thesis was validated at the highest possible level.

Walking Benji this morning, the smoke was visible before we’d gone a block. You could smell it. The sun hung orange and small in a gray-brown sky. It felt like Mars.

Déjà vu. All over again. The Canadian wildfires are back, the smoke is here, and the forecast that made this entirely predictable was available 48 hours ago.

This Is Not a Surprise. It’s a Pattern.

The 2023 Canadian wildfire season burned 15 million hectares — more than doubling the previous record and turning New York City’s sky orange in an event that made international headlines.

In 2026, close to 40,000 fires have already torn through more than 3.6 million acres across the US — almost 10,000 more fires and nearly a million more acres burned than the 10-year average for mid-July. Roughly 850 fires are burning across Canada right now, including more than 100 in Ontario. An enormous heat dome over the upper Midwest has created a clockwise air rotation, scooping up smoke from Canada and Minnesota and carrying it eastward across the most densely populated corridor in the country.

The science of smoke transport is well established. When wildfires burn in specific Canadian provinces under specific wind patterns, the smoke follows predictable atmospheric pathways southward into the US. NOAA’s Air Quality Forecast Guidance and commercial air quality platforms can model that transport with meaningful accuracy 24-72 hours in advance.

The event is not unpredictable. The response should not be reactive.

The data on the trend is unambiguous. Per-person annual exposure to wildfire smoke in the US was four times higher on average between 2020 and 2024 than during the prior fourteen years, according to Stanford University’s Environmental Change and Human Outcomes Lab.

Climate change is the driver — research published in 2025 found that anthropogenic climate change contributed 33 to 82% of the observed increase in burned area in the western United States from 1992 to 2020, and accounts for nearly half of the increase in surface smoke PM2.5 concentrations.

This is not a weather story. It is a climate story. And it’s accelerating.

The Health Stakes Are Not Subtle

The academic literature on wildfire smoke and human health has been accumulating rapidly, and the findings are consistent. A systematic review and meta-analysis of over 124 million patients published in 2025 found that for every 10 μg/m3 increase in PM2.5 exposure, wildfire smoke drives a 4% increase in emergency department visits, a 4% increase in hospital admissions, and a 2% increase in all-cause mortality.

The pattern holds hardest at the edges of the population.

Pediatric asthma-related ED visits may increase by over 30% during wildfire events. Elderly COPD patients face heightened hospitalization and mortality risk. Between 2019 and 2024, wildfire smoke caused an estimated 24,000 to 62,000 asthma emergency department visits in the US alone.

The smoke blanketing the Eastern US today is not just an acute health event. It’s a chronic health risk that accumulates with every exposure.

The New York event during the June 2023 Canadian wildfire smoke episode remains the most documented US case study. A CDC field report analyzing all 134 emergency departments in New York State outside New York City found that asthma-associated ED visits increased markedly when air quality reached its poorest levels during the event.

What BreezoMeter Taught Me — and What Comes Next

When I was working to develop BreezoMeter’s North American business, the core insight was that air quality data was everywhere, but actionable air quality intelligence was almost nowhere to be found.

The same Color Code system that had been telling people “it’s a red air quality day, sensitive groups should limit outdoor activity” since the 1990s was still the primary public health communication tool for a risk that had grown four times more severe in the preceding decade.

Google bought BreezoMeter because they understood that environmental intelligence embedded in products people already use — Maps, Search, Android — reaches people at the moment of relevance rather than in a general advisory that most people ignore.

The next step in that thesis is what ERaaS Health and Hippocratic.ai are building — environmental intelligence embedded in health-intervention infrastructure rather than in consumer apps.

Not "it's a red air quality day" sent to everyone. But a message from a conversational (and multilingual) weather intelligence agent, in this case, Rachel, sent directly to a specific member with COPD in zip code 10025:

“The air in your neighborhood is expected to turn very unhealthy within 24 hours; here's what that means for you today; make sure your rescue inhaler is refilled”

That is not a public announcement. That is a specific health intervention—enabled by AI. The difference between those two things is measurable in fewer emergency room visits, fewer hospitalizations, and, ultimately, lives saved.

From Instinct to Infrastructure

BreezoMeter’s thesis was that air quality data should be as accessible and actionable as a weather forecast. Google paid for that thesis.

ERaaS Health and Hippocratic.ai are building the next one — health intelligence as proactive and precise as the environmental data that predicts it.

Wildfire smoke events affecting the Eastern US are no longer rare. They’re a predictable feature of every summer — more frequent, more intense, and more foreseeable than the public health response currently reflects.

Benji and I cut the walk short this morning. I closed the windows. I checked the AQI. Individual protective action is instinctive. Organizational proactive response — identifying at-risk members, initiating outreach, closing the gap before the ER fills up — requires infrastructure that matches the speed of the forecast.

That infrastructure exists. That’s the mission ERaaS Health and Hippocratic.ai are built around: actionable intelligence that saves lives.

Musical Coda

© 2026 G2 Weather Intelligence. All rights reserved.

We’ve been spending a lot of time at our cottage on the Delaware shore this summer — fishing, walking the dog, cutting grass, and generally enjoying the kind of schedule that comes with being editor-in-chief of your own independent publication.

Which is to say, I make my own schedule, and lately the schedule has called for more time with a rod in the sand and less time in front of a screen.

I'll be honest — I've thought about pulling an Irish goodbye on the Substack. Just quietly disappearing into the summer.

But somewhere along the way this publication found an audience of over 700 subscribers and followers who actually show up for it, and that feels like an obligation worth honoring even when the fishing is good, and the heat index in Philadelphia is making the Delaware shore look like the smartest real estate decision I ever made.

The Weather Didn’t Take a Vacation

Late June and July are when extreme heat has its biggest impact on consumer spending and, more importantly, on public health — and this summer delivered on both fronts while I was gone.

The weather didn’t take a vacation just because I did.

The July 4th heat dome delivered exactly what the forecast had been showing for more than a week.

Philadelphia’s Fourth of July parade was canceled. Washington’s Independence Day parade was canceled. Two of the most iconic American holiday traditions, in two of the most historically significant cities in the country, were shut down by the same weather system the models had been tracking since late June.

The National Mall fireworks went ahead anyway — 850,000 pyrotechnics over forty minutes, the largest display in history according to the organizers. Under the stagnant atmospheric conditions that had been baking the capital for days, the smoke had nowhere to go.

According to air quality data provided by Ambee — a climate intelligence platform that turns environmental data into actionable business intelligence — PM2.5 levels peaked at more than six times normal, crossed the EPA threshold for “unhealthy” air, and lingered for hours after the display ended, drifting as far as fifteen miles downwind into neighborhoods still recovering from the heat.

Airborne magnesium — used to create bright white flashes in fireworks and capable of irritating skin and lungs — increased by more than 9,000 percent.

Before the show, the National Park Service had conducted its own analysis projecting "hazardous" air quality near the National Mall during and after the display, and "very unhealthy" conditions in downtown Washington, Capitol Hill, and across the Potomac in Arlington.

That analysis was not released to the public — an omission that current and former Park Service employees called … unusual.

Heat Doesn’t Go to the Hospital. People Do.

Most people think about extreme heat the way a TV meteorologist presents it — it’s going to be hot, stay hydrated, find air conditioning. Healthcare systems think about it very differently, because the heat itself is never the patient.

The person suffering heat stroke is the patient. The person arriving dehydrated and in cardiac stress is the patient. The COPD patient whose symptoms worsened after breathing six times normal PM2.5 levels at 5 AM on July 5th is the patient. The elderly resident in a north Washington neighborhood who couldn’t get a wellness check in time is the patient.

The heat didn’t go to the hospital. The people the heat hurt did.

Weather changes how many people need care, what they present with, and when they arrive — in a sequence that the forecast makes visible well in advance of any of it happening.

That is not a meteorological observation. It is an operational one, and it changes everything about how a health plan, a hospital system, or an employer with outdoor workers should be thinking about the next heat event that is already showing up in this week’s forecast.

The Tools Being Built for This Moment

This is exactly the problem that ERaaS Health is built to address. I serve as an advisor to the company, founded by Samrat Kulkarni, which gives me a close view of what proactive weather-informed health intervention looks like in practice.

ERaaS provides the intelligence layer — identifying at-risk members before the event peaks, triggering proactive outreach, and surfacing escalations to health plan care teams for wellness checks, cooling center referrals, and emergency interventions.

The deployment layer is Hippocratic.ai — an AI agent platform purpose-built for healthcare outreach at scale. ERaaS’s weather-informed risk intelligence combined with Hippocratic.ai’s deployment infrastructure is what makes proactive intervention possible across thousands of members simultaneously, at the speed the forecast window requires rather than the speed of the emergency room intake queue.

During last summer’s heat events, the system demonstrated what that looks like in practice — moving from data to proactive intervention in under twenty-four hours, identifying at-risk members, initiating outreach through an AI agent, and surfacing escalations to care teams for targeted support.

The results among engaged members were striking: a 47% reduction in ER and inpatient admissions, nine out of ten member call satisfaction, and an estimated 5-to-1 return on investment.

Not a pilot. A deployed system. Running at the speed of the forecast.

While I Was Fishing, Rachel Was Working

I came back from the shore rested and slightly sunburned, with a healthy appreciation for what a near-normal temperature pattern feels like when the alternative is a 110-degree heat index ninety miles to the north — only to find another heat event already building across the Eastern US this week.

The atmosphere runs on its own schedule.

It doesn't care that organizations are still recovering from the July 4th heat event. The signal has been visible for more than a week — above-normal temperatures forecast across the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast, another round of elevated heat index values, another predictable sequence of health and demand impacts building in the pipeline.

The heat didn’t take a vacation. The signal didn’t either. While I was packing up the cottage, ERaaS Health’s AI agent Rachel was already hard at work — reaching out proactively to vulnerable members in New York City ahead of this week’s heat event. Not waiting for the emergency room to fill up. Acting on the forecast.

Weather is a predictable driver of population health risk, yet most healthcare organizations still aren’t acting on it proactively at scale. ERaaS and Hippocratic.ai are built to change that.

Actionable intelligence that saves lives. That’s the mission we share.

© 2026 G2 Weather Intelligence. All rights reserved.

I spent five years at IBM Consulting after the company acquired The Weather Company and saw firsthand what happened when a retailer or CPG company sought to build an integrated weather strategy.

The business case was clear. The data was available — and relatively inexpensive. The financial opportunity was real and measurable. But the consulting financial model made the math not work.

Billable hours. Utilization targets. Multi-million dollar engagement economics. A large team of consultants required to connect weather intelligence across seasonal planning, demand forecasting, pricing, marketing, staffing, and financial risk management. A multi-year transformation timeline before the ROI showed up in the P&L.

Most retailers looked at that equation and made a rational decision: pass. Or pilot. A demand forecasting experiment here. A weather-triggered marketing campaign there. Point solutions that never connect to the integrated system that delivers real value.

Weather intell…

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The forecast high at Citizens Bank Park: 104 degrees. (!)

We’ve already purchased hand fans and cooling towels and are hoping the forecast isn’t as dire as it looks. But I’ve spent more than thirty years in the weather forecasting business, and the signal has been unambiguous and persistent for the last week — it’s going to be a Fourth of July scorcher.

And this is not a one-day event. The 8-14 day outlook extends the above-normal signal through July 13th

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One analytics foundation powers it all.

The weather-to-demand relationships established in seasonal planning — the historical correlations between temperature, precipitation, geography, and consumer behavior — are the same relationships that inform demand forecasting, inventory distribution, markdown pricing, and marketing activation. Build the analytics layer once. Every function draws from it.

The sum is far greater than the parts.

A retailer running weather-optimized marketing on top of weather-optimized inventory is compounding the signal. The demand is there because the forecast predicted it. The inventory is there because the distribution responded …

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El Niño was officially declared on June 11 — and a Super El Niño may be on the way.

NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center upgraded its alert status from El Niño Watch to El Niño Advisory, signifying that El Niño conditions are now present in the equatorial Pacific and expected to strengthen.

My pal and G2 Weather Intelligence subscriber Andrew Freedman covered it for CNN — if you follow weather and climate, he’s a great read.

NOAA now puts the odds of a strong El Niño at nearly 90% and the odds of a very strong — Super — El Niño at over 60% by autumn. Some models project that Pacific sea surface temperatures will exceed the record-breaking levels of 1982-83 and 1997-98.

If verified, this would be the most powerful El Niño in recorded history.

One important caveat. The oceanic signal and the atmospheric response are not the same thing. NOAA’s own forecasters noted this week that E…

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This is the third post in the G2 Weather Intelligence Brainstorm series on building an integrated retail weather strategy.

The first post covered seasonal planning — how much to buy. The second covered demand forecasting and distribution — where to send it. This post covers pricing — specifically, markdown pricing — and the weather variable that most optimization systems still don’t fully exploit.

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This is the second post in the G2 Weather Intelligence Brainstorm series on using weather intelligence across the retail planning cycle.

The first post covered seasonal planning — using long-range weather outlooks to set the strategic foundation before the season begins.

This post covers the next step: demand forecasting and inventory optimization. If the first post was about strategy, this one is about money.

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"God created economists to make weather forecasters look good."

The most accurate forward-looking signal available to any retailer with seasonal categories isn't on Wall Street. It's at NOAA. And the latest outlook is unambiguous.

The updated 6-10 day outlook issued June 8 shows a deep below-normal temperature pool dominating the Central and Eastern US through June 14-18 — blue from the Rockies to the Mid-Atlantic. Above-normal precipitation across the South and Southeast.

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Last week, I wrote that Gap had nowhere to hide in Q1. The warmest spring in more than 130 years couldn’t save Old Navy’s dress business.

Macy’s told a different story this morning — comparable sales up 3%, the strongest first quarter performance in four years, with dresses as a standout category in the same weather window that Old Navy couldn’t convert.

That contrast tells you something important: the weather was the same for everyone. What differed was execution, assortment, and, importantly, who walked through the door.

Macy’s customer base skews middle- to upper-income. That customer is less exposed to fuel cost pressures and the collapse in sentiment that is hitting lower-income households. With the S&P 500 near record highs and wealth effects still positive for highe…

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“It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall” —Bob Dylan

CNBC’s retail roundup this week called Q1 “surprisingly robust” and correctly identified three tailwinds that buoyed results — tax refunds, buy now pay later, and consumer resilience.

What it missed? The weather.

February through April 2026 was one of the warmest springs in more than 130 years. The national temperature ran more than 5 degrees above normal for the entire window.

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Last November, I warned that Gap was right for the wrong reasons — that great weather, not execution, was supporting their results, and that they would be blindsided when conditions reversed.

What happened next made the story worse than I anticipated.

The weather didn’t reverse in Q1 2026. It got better. February through April delivered one of the warmest springs in more than 130 years. Multiple regions ranked among the warmest on record. The national temperature ran more than 5 degrees above normal for the entire window.

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I don’t normally publish two days in a row. But AutoZone’s earnings miss landed squarely in my wheelhouse, my latest podcast dropped today with eerily good timing, and it’s raining again — so my plan to mow the front yard and back forty will have to wait.

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I saw it coming — just not all of it.

As the holiday week came into range, the short-range forecasts told a clear story here in the mid-Atlantic: Memorial Day week was a tale of two seasons.

We eat our own cooking at G2 Weather Intelligence, so we acted on the signal. Packed up and headed to our cottage at the Delaware shore for the heat wave window, then returned to headquarters in the western Philadelphia suburbs ahead of the deterioration.

At the beach, my wife took my photo. Neither of us noticed the black bird flying overhead until we looked at the image later. I took it as an omen.

It was …

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"The further back you can look, the further forward you are likely to see." — Sir Winston Churchill

Lately, I find myself with more time on my hands than I've had in over thirty years — and I absolutely love it. Doing my own thing while being accountable to no one (outside of my own house, of course) is the best job I've ever had — and I've had some good ones.

And it’s given me the time to read more history than I have in decades. Lately, I’ve been absorbed by Timothy Egan’s account of the Dust Bowl and Andrew Ross Sorkin’s reconstruction of the 1929 crash.

They both cover the same general era — two different catastrophes, one environmental and one financial — and yet if you blur your eyes, the patterns are remarkably similar. Warning signs that were visible and ignored. Systems that worked brilliantly until they didn’t. Decision-makers who planned for the continuation of what they already knew rather than the probability of what was actually coming.

The farmers of the High Plains kept pl…

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Three major retailers — Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Target — reported earnings this week. All three beat expectations, navigating a choppy quarter marked by shifting weather patterns, persistent DIY softness, and a macro environment that kept demand for large projects under pressure.

But across the two home center calls, the most significant demand variable — weather — still doesn’t have a systematic home in how these companies communicate forward guidance to investors.

Lowe’s CFO Brandon Sink settled the debate when JPMorgan’s Christopher Horvers pressed him on whether tax refunds were the primary Q1 lift.

Sink was direct: “We looked at Q1, the tax refund impact was more limited on our business. More significant dri…

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My wife and I — and Benji, too — are decamping tomorrow for our summer cottage near Bethany Beach.

Three reasons: the forecast for our PA HQ in the western suburbs of Philadelphia is calling for mid-90s through Wednesday; we want to get ahead of the Memorial Day weekend crowds; and we’re fortunate enough to be able to dodge the suburban heatwave, fill the gas tank, and head south before what may turn out to be a “premature elaboration” of summer.

And elaborate it will — at least for now.

The New York Post is calling it a “triple-digit burn.” The National Weather Service says “heat will be making headlines for much of the Eastern US for the first half of the week.” USA TODAY is calling it “sudden summer.”

They’re all right. After a cool start to May — two weeks of …

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Nobody is talking about the weather.

They should be.

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"The animal spirits in the Northeast have been on a tight leash all spring. The week of Memorial Day cuts it."

A week ago, I described the Northeast Memorial Day setup as a coiled spring of consumer demand — it’s still true, and the tension is building.

It reminded me of that time last fall when Benji spotted an unsuspecting cat during our morning walk. I got it on video. (Of course I did.)

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