#104 - The Weather Is Quietly Rewiring Your Behaviour with OpenWeather's Danny Johns

This week on GAEA Talks, Graeme Scott sits down with Danny Johns of OpenWeather and The Weather Foundation, for a conversation about the part of the weather nobody measures: what it does to us.Danny joined the Met Office at nineteen as an observer and worked his way up to operational forecaster, on the bench, on shifts, producing forecasts for just about every industry you can name, from pigeon racing to hot air balloons to energy production. He became the first of what the Met Office then called Public Weather Service consultants, working with local resilience forums and first responders. He spent five months in the Falklands launching weather balloons, then moved to Vaisala and road meteorology, before joining OpenWeather and The Weather Foundation.The idea at the centre of this episode is what he calls the iceberg effect. Above the surface is severe weather, the thing that makes us notice something unusual is happening. Below the surface is everything else, the constant and mostly invisible way the weather shapes how we move, what we buy and where we go. We have spent our entire history trying to build our way out of caring about it, and we still respond to it every single day.The research he is doing with The Weather Foundation, the London School of Economics and Imperial College is starting to quantify it. Total transport volume across a city stays remarkably static in bad weather, because people do not stop travelling, they swap how they travel and where they get off. Commuters are barely weather sensitive, because the train runs and you still have to go to work. Discretionary travel is where it all shows up. And persistence matters more than peaks. A single hot day moves nothing. Three consecutive hot days, on the right days of the week, moves everything.The other half is what AI is doing to forecasting. Model resolution was twelve to eighteen kilometres when Danny started. Operationally it is now one to two kilometres. Imperial are working at one metre. That is personalised weather, a new forecast point every step you take. Which raises the question he keeps returning to: with two synoptic stations in London and 2,500 forecast points across Hyde Park alone, how would you ever know if any of it is right?