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

The Health Story Comes First

A 104-degree day at a baseball stadium is uncomfortable for a healthy adult. For an elderly person without air conditioning, a very young child, or someone with a chronic health condition, it can be life-threatening.

Last summer’s heat events killed 19 New Yorkers in four days. Most died at home, without air conditioning. The NYC Health Department estimates approximately 500 New Yorkers die from heat-related causes every year — the vast majority quietly, without making the news cycle. NYC experienced four separate heat waves last summer, finishing 2025 as its second-hottest summer on record.

Western Europe is already there. Multiple countries issued red alerts — warnings of “a risk to life for even the healthy population” — as temperatures exceeded 104 degrees Fahrenheit across France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. French nuclear power plants cut output by approximately 7% of total demand as high temperatures limited access to cooling water. Rail networks, schools, and working hours were disrupted across the continent.

The same forecast system that is showing 104 degrees at Citizens Bank Park on July 2nd showed those European temperatures weeks in advance. The question is never whether the signal is visible. It is whether the systems are in place to act on it before the emergency room fills up.

AI-First Health Resilience — At the Speed of a Heat Wave

This is exactly the problem that ERaaS Health is built to address. I serve as an advisor to the company, founded by Samrat Kulkarni. ERaaS develops AI-first health intervention tools specifically targeting heat-related illness and mortality risk — working with health insurance companies to identify at-risk members before a heat emergency peaks and intervene proactively.

During last summer’s heat events, ERaaS demonstrated what prevention looks like at the speed of a forecast. The system moved from data to proactive intervention in under 24 hours — identifying at-risk members, initiating outreach through an AI agent, and surfacing escalations to health plan care teams for wellness checks, cooling center referrals, and emergency interventions.

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

As heat events become more frequent and more severe, the ability to move at the speed of the forecast — not the speed of the emergency room — is what separates a preventable death from a statistic.

Investors Are Paying Attention

The financial markets are beginning to price what the forecast has been signaling for years.

CNBC reported last week that investors are actively rethinking portfolio positioning in response to the European heat wave. Stephanie Niven, co-portfolio manager of the Global Sustainable Equity strategy at Ninety One, told CNBC that her team views the rise in extreme weather as “a structural growth opportunity” — seeking companies with products and solutions that “lean into helping people respond and build resilience in a challenging time.”

Her fund’s holdings include insurers such as Aon and Intact Financial — companies that are building more sophisticated climate modeling into their risk systems. And cooling and refrigeration manufacturers like Trane Technologies, which makes the physical infrastructure that keeps people alive during extreme heat.

Morningstar’s chief equity strategist Michael Field identified Johnson Controls and Siemens as major beneficiaries — both operate in the HVAC space where commercial heat pumps that double as cooling devices are seeing structural demand growth. UBS noted that the European heat wave has already pushed spot power prices higher as aging electrical infrastructure struggled to cope with surging cooling demand — identifying ABB, Schneider Electric, and Siemens as key beneficiaries of the grid modernization investment that follows.

The investment thesis is converging on the same signal the weather forecast has been delivering for weeks: extreme heat is no longer a tail risk. It is a structural condition that requires structural solutions.

ERaaS Health is one of those solutions — at the intersection of AI, health insurance, and climate resilience. The market is beginning to understand what that’s worth.

What the Heat Means for Consumer Demand

For retailers, the Fourth of July heat signal is the demand catalyst that the first three weeks of June didn’t deliver.

Cooling categories are the immediate beneficiary — air conditioners, fans, portable cooling units. The current signal is strong enough to drive meaningful category lift across the Eastern US through July 13th.

Home center retail is where the weather impact is most apparent in July. The same heat that suppresses outdoor project activity in the short term drives purchases of cooling equipment, irrigation, and lawn recovery as consumers respond to the stress on their homes, yards, and vehicles.

One important caveat: electricity prices are elevated — driven by the Iran conflict and structural demand from AI data centers competing for the same grid capacity.

A heat wave that drives around-the-clock air conditioning use is not just a demand driver for cooling products. It is a direct wallet squeeze on an already financially stressed consumer. Every dollar going to the electricity bill is a dollar not going to discretionary retail.

Heat plus high electricity costs is a consumer squeeze, not a clean demand driver.

Why the Heat Moderates in the Second Half of July

The forecasters at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center explain the science in their weekly technical discussion.

Here’s the plain-language version —

Two large-scale weather patterns are competing for control of the US atmosphere in mid-July. A ridge of high pressure — a dome of warm sinking air — is building strongly over the Western US. That is what keeps the West hot.

To the east, a trough — a dip in the upper-level wind pattern that allows cooler air to push southward — is expected to develop near the Great Lakes. That trough moderates heat in the Central and Eastern US during the second half of July.

The western ridge is clear across all forecast models — high confidence. The eastern trough is where the uncertainty lives. The models disagree on exactly where it sets up and how deep it goes. When models disagree at two to three weeks’ range, NOAA’s forecasters hedge — which is why the Central Plains and Great Lakes show Equal Chances in the Week 3-4 outlook rather than a strong temperature signal.

The same trough that moderates the heat also generates precipitation. Troughs are associated with rising air, clouds, and storm systems. The above-normal precipitation signal returning to the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic in the second half of July is a direct consequence of the troughing pattern expected to develop over the Great Lakes.

The bottom line: the Fourth of July heat event is real and building. The atmospheric setup driving it is not forecast to persist through mid-July. One strong demand week does not replicate last summer’s sustained heat pattern. The second half of July looks more like a normal summer — and normal after last July’s historic heat is a headwind, not a tailwind.

The G2 Weather Intelligence Signal

The Fourth of July window is delivering what the forecast promised weeks ago. Cooling categories and home center retail stand to benefit from a strong heat signal across the Eastern US through July 13th.

Watch the precipitation outlook as the holiday weekend comes into the short-range forecast. Rain is the swing variable — and the Week 3-4 maps show it returning to the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic in the back half of the month.

One more thing: I’ll report back on the hand fans and cooling fans. Wish us luck.

© 2026 G2 Weather Intelligence. All rights reserved.

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 to it. The consumer shows up because the marketing was activated at exactly the right moment. That is the integrated system. That is the competitive advantage.

Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Early 1990s.

We had just returned from Operation Desert Storm — one of the most decisive military victories in American history. One hundred hours of ground combat. Coalition forces overwhelmed a battle-hardened Iraqi army with precision and speed the world had never seen.

I was the weather operations chief at Fort Campbell, Kentucky — deployed alongside the 101st Airborne Division, the 5th Special Forces Group, and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. The Night Stalkers.

If you know the US Army, you know what that means. These are not ordinary units. They’re among the most elite combat units in the American military — the ones that go first, go deep, and go where no one else can. The tip of the spear. Literally.

Our customers didn’t ask about the weather out of curiosity. They asked because lives depended on the answer. Go or no-go. Route selection. Insertion timing. The difference between a successful mission and a catastrophic one could be a single weather decision made hours in advance with incomplete information. We provided the intelligence. The warfighters made the call.

Back at Fort Campbell, in those days — before the internet, before digital everything — the weather station was still powered by teletype machines for data and fax machines for weather maps. It was all paper.

The only full-color satellite and radar loops we had came from The Weather Channel, on the TV mounted above the forecast counter. Functional between commercial breaks and, of course, Weather on the 8s.

The same Weather Channel that, twenty years later, would hire me to help transform it from a media company into a data and analytics platform.

I never imagined that one day I’d work there. But the question that Desert Storm planted never left me: What is weather intelligence actually worth if it doesn’t improve operational outcomes?

In 2011, The Weather Channel Company hired me to find out.

Paul Walsh, a former meteorologist with the U.S. Air Force who spent a little more than a decade in the private sector helping companies predict how weather patterns might affect their businesses, was tapped as the cable network’s vp of weather analytics. In the newly created role, Walsh will head up a nascent initiative to sell highly targeted weather predictions to the channel’s advertisers.

Source: ADWEEK

The Mission

My mandate in 2011 was to lead the development of a Weather Analytics function — and, with it, the transformation of The Weather Channel Company from a media company with data to a data-and-analytics company that was also a media company.

That distinction matters. A media company with data uses weather to attract an audience. A data and analytics company uses weather to change how businesses make decisions.

The forecast wasn’t the product. What you could do with it was the product.

Tampa, 2012

Not quite a year into the role, we ran our first live test of what would eventually become a new ad targeting system called WEATHERfx.

The Republican National Convention was about to begin in Tampa, and inside the newsroom, there was growing concern that a tropical system (nascent Hurricane Issac) developing in the Gulf could disrupt the event.

Producers were preparing contingency plans. Talent was standing by. If confidence in Tampa's potential impact increased, they would send an on-air team into the city days before landfall.

One of our first advertising partners was Duracell. Instead of waiting for the National Weather Service to issue official warnings, we asked a different question: what if we used the forecast — not the weather itself — to decide when to begin advertising?

As confidence increased that Tampa could be affected, we triggered the Duracell campaign days before official warnings were issued. Consumers hadn’t started preparing yet — but they would. Batteries would be one of the first things they bought when they did.

The campaign dramatically outperformed expectations and, as I recall, led to a significantly larger Duracell commitment going forward.

But the bigger lesson wasn’t about batteries. We hadn’t just run a better ad. We’d answered a question that most marketing organizations never ask: when is the consumer most likely to need this product — and how far in advance can we see it coming?

Weather wasn’t just something to forecast. It was a marketing signal.

The Four Questions Every Company Is Trying to Answer

Every retailer, brand, and consumer-facing business is trying to answer the same four questions — usually independently, rarely simultaneously.

How much do I need? Seasonal planning. The weather predicts demand deviation from baseline before the season begins. The seasonal buy is a fixed decision — but it should be a probability-weighted one, informed by the best available long-range forecast at the time of the buy. Get this wrong and every downstream decision is fighting an uphill battle.

Where should I put it? Distribution. The right inventory in the right stores at the right time. A heat signal building in the Northeast is a reallocation trigger for cooling categories — before the heat arrives, not after.

What should I charge for it? Markdown pricing. The same weather signal that drove the inventory decision should inform the pricing decision.

• A cool April with a warm pattern building in the 10-day forecast is a hold-the-markdown signal for spring apparel — the demand is coming, don't surrender the margin early.

• A cool April with no recovery in the forecast is a mark-it-down signal — move the inventory before the season closes. The consumer's price sensitivity shifts with the weather. The pricing model has to see the same forecast as the inventory model.

When should I tell customers — and what should I say? Marketing activation and creative are two sides of the same decision, and the weather signal drives both.

Timing first. Don’t advertise umbrellas after it starts raining. Activate when forecast confidence crosses the threshold that drives consumer preparation behavior. The Duracell campaign worked because we acted on the forecast — not the event. By the time the NWS issued warnings, every competitor was running the same message. We were already three days ahead.

Message second. Cold weather, heat wave, storm prep, backyard weekend, holiday travel — different context, different mindset, different message.

A consumer in Boston during a heat wave and a consumer in Phoenix during the same event have completely different baseline experiences. The Boston consumer is caught off guard. The Phoenix consumer is in their normal summer.

Same temperature signal. Completely different creative brief. The forecast tells you when to activate. The weather regime tells you what to say. Both inputs come from the same signal.

The Big Idea

None of these decisions should happen independently.

A markdown system that doesn’t see the same forecast as the marketing team is working against itself. A marketing campaign that activates on a calendar date while the inventory system is responding to a weather signal is firing blind. A demand forecast that updates weekly while the promotional calendar updates monthly is leaving money on the table.

The weather signal connects all four. Inventory. Distribution. Pricing. Marketing. One signal. One system. Every function responds to the same forecast at the same time.

That signal today is the weather. Tomorrow, it’ll be AI-generated demand intelligence that incorporates weather and a dozen other real-time variables. The principle remains exactly the same: the value isn’t in having better data. It’s in getting every function to act on the same data at the right time.

The Research Confirms It

Two studies make the case — one from academia, one from the organization I helped build.

A peer-reviewed study published in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science — drawing on field experiment data from over six million mobile users across 344 cities — found that consumer response to mobile promotions was 1.2 times higher and 73% faster in sunny weather than in cloudy weather.

More importantly, people responded especially well when actual weather was better than forecast — reinforcing that forecast context matters more than current conditions. You are not marketing to the weather. You are marketing to the consumer’s expectation of the weather.

In 2025, The Weather Company took that finding further. Working with Neuro-Insight, a global leader in brain-based marketing research, they conducted a neuroscience study — “Wired for Weather” — that measured subconscious brain responses in 182 participants exposed to weather conditions and paired advertisements. Key findings:

Overall:

• Ads aligned with weather-driven emotional states lifted ROI by up to 18%

• Ads served immediately after a consumer checks the weather tap into fresh emotional responses — a more powerful moment of influence than calendar-based or demographic-targeted campaigns

Sunny days:

• +10% Engagement

• +12% Detail Memory — a key predictor of purchase intent

• +19% Global Memory — brand storytelling retention

Rainy days:

• +29% Engagement

• +22% Detail Memory

• +25% Global Memory

Gen Z:

• Up to +13% higher memory encoding

• +12% increased engagement on sunny days compared to the general population

The Weather Company built the capability I helped start into a precision advertising platform backed by neuroscience. The Duracell campaign in Tampa was the proof of concept. The “Wired for Weather” study is the scientific validation.

Weather isn’t just a backdrop. It is an emotional and cognitive signal that shapes how people process and remember brand messages. The forecast changes the consumer’s mindset. The right message in the right weather regime doesn’t just reach the consumer — it reaches them when they are most neurologically receptive to it.

Where This Fits

Marketing is the fourth post in this series for a reason. It is not the first lever you pull. It is the demand activation layer — the mechanism that ensures that when inventory is in the right place and priced correctly, the consumer actually shows up to buy it.

Seasonal planning sets the buy. Demand forecasting optimizes the distribution. Pricing manages the margin. Marketing activates the demand. The four are not four separate decisions. They are one decision made at four levels of the planning hierarchy — and the same weather signal connects all of them.

A retailer running weather-optimized marketing on top of weather-optimized inventory is compounding the signal. That compounding effect is where the real competitive advantage lives. Not in any single capability — in the integration of all of them.

The Forecast Was Never the Product

In 2015, IBM announced the acquisition of The Weather Company for a reported $2 billion.

Not for the television network. Not for the consumer app. For the data, the analytics, and the enterprise intelligence platform built on the thesis that weather was a business signal — and that the companies that could act on it faster and more precisely than their competitors had a structural advantage.

At Fort Campbell, we called that advantage decision superiority. The force with the best weather intelligence didn’t just have a better forecast — it had better timing, better positioning, and better coordination across every function of the mission.

The forecast was the input. Synchronized action was the output.

WEATHERfx applied the same principle to marketing. The Duracell campaign wasn’t remarkable because we had better weather data than our competitors. It was remarkable because we connected the forecast to the activation decision faster than anyone else — and marketing responded to the signal before consumers even knew they needed the product.

IBM paid $2 billion in part for that vision. The full realization of it — every function of a retail or consumer enterprise responding to the same weather signal simultaneously — remains, frankly, a work in progress across the industry.

That gap is precisely what this series is about.

Next in the series: weather-driven staffing optimization — scheduling for the forecast, not the calendar.

Watch the Conversation

How Weather Influences Retail, Marketing, and Human Behavior — I joined David G. Ewing on Content Kingdom to talk through the ideas behind this post: weather intelligence, consumer behavior, predictive marketing, and where AI takes it next. From strawberry Pop-Tarts before hurricanes to the future of weather-driven advertising.

© 2026 G2 Weather Intelligence. All rights reserved.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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

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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.”

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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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“In the next year or two, the enterprise world will sort into two camps: companies where AI runs their business, and companies where AI is still a project,” —IBM CEO Arvind Krishna

The commercial weather industry has an emerging business model problem opportunity.

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Pent-up demand released into a warm, dry Memorial Day window is not a gentle recovery — it's a surge.

Every year around this time, our wisteria explodes. Purple cascades so thick you can’t see the pergola underneath. This year, a late April freeze killed the blooms before they had a chance. Bare wood where there should be flowers.

If you didn’t know better, you’d write the same obituary for spring retail. Tariff anxiety. Consumer confidence wobbling. War in Iran driving gas prices through the roof. The narrative practically writes itself: spring 2026 is impaired, seasonal categories are exposed, and the smart money is sitting on the sidelines.

The weather forecast says otherwise.

Last Memorial Day Wasn’t a Consumer Story. It Was a Weather Story.

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One of my favorite Amazon TV shows is Clarkson’s Farm, starring the eponymous — and at times controversial — Jeremy Clarkson. He and I are roughly the same age. He’s funnier and considerably wealthier. But I’m (way!) more fit — and I’d beat him in a foot race 11 times out of 10.

In nearly every episode, Jeremy announces he’s had a brainstorm. It usually leads to something brilliant, expensive, and ultimately disastrous. A restaurant. A bee farm. A combine harvester he can’t operate.

That’s something we have in common. I have brainstorms, too. Mine happen on the elliptical or out on a run (as noted, I’m way more fit). Ninety percent of the time, post-endorphin high, they end up “in the bin.”

This morning I had another one.

Welcome to my Friday Brainstorm. Occasional. Subscriber-only. Topical or completely off the rails — depending on the morning.

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