From Assumptions to Answers: How OpenWeather Is Bringing Road-Level Intelligence to Winter Maintenance
For decades, highway authorities have made some of their most consequential operational decisions based on regional forecasts, professional instinct, and very little ground truth.
The cost of getting it wrong can run into millions of pounds, whether that's a preventable accident on an untreated road or a winter season's worth of unnecessary salt spend. OpenWeather, exhibiting at Cold Comfort 2026, believes the industry has reached a turning point.
By combining affordable road surface temperature sensors with machine learning and round-the-clock meteorological support, they are giving duty teams something that has always been in short supply: confidence in what is actually happening at road level, right now.
We sat down with Daniel Johns, Senior Strategic Consultant at OpenWeather, to find out how the technology works, what it means in practice for councils like Cumberland, and why the gap between sky and surface matters more than most people realise.