Eye of the Storm

Matthew E. Cappucci ’19 stands in front of the green screen and adjusts his tie, the same gray one that he wears for most of his forecasts. An off-camera monitor shows a storm creeping across a map of the East Coast. The digital reproduction is far more tame than some of the storms Cappucci has seen—he’s chased a fair number of tornadoes and hurricanes. A production assistant applies Cappucci’s makeup and feeds a microphone wire down the back of his shirt.

“We’ll be barbecuing way past dinnertime by June 1,” he says, motioning toward invisible figures on the Green Screen. The monitor shows Cappucci standing in front of a chart of sunset times, pointing to “June 1st—8:16 p.m.”

With Cappucci’s TV-ready voice and bumping electronic music that plays between takes, you’d never guess that this entire scene is taking place beneath one of the quietest spots on campus—Widener Library. The Hauser Studio, a state-of-the-art production facility located in the library’s basement, provides the set for Cappucci’s weekly forecast videos, which he posts to his Youtube channel.

At Harvard, Capucci has made a name for himself as the unofficial meteorologist of the Class of 2019 Facebook group. When students’ travel plans were threatened by snowstorms at the end of winter break, Cappucci responded to dozens of concerned commenters.

“Oh… that [flight is] not getting off the ground,” he replied to a student flying to Boston from California. “And if it does, that is NOT a flight I would want to be on!”

Cappucci’s forecast posts have continued since the beginning of second semester, predicting temperature and snowfall and sharing them with the Class of 2019.

“Good morning Harvard,” begins his post from Feb. 7. “Enjoy the sunshine today, because we’ll see another 7-10” of snow tomorrow!”

When one commenter said that the prospect of a snowstorm made her want to cry, Cappucci wrote, “Don’t cry! Those tears will just freeze onto your face. Even with the salt that will reduce freezing temperatures,” he explained further, “they’ll still crystallize because of the below-average conditions.”

Cappucci has put together a forecast every day for the last six years—to do this well, he tells me, one has to “get intimate with the weather.”

“You have to know what it’s doing at every moment,” he explains. “Whether it’s consciously looking at models and getting data and analyzing it, or just passive observation, you always have to know what’s going on.”

Cappucci’s fascination with weather began when he was two years old. During storms, he would go outside to watch lightning strike, or stay inside to observe anemometers spin. Cappucci hails from Cape Cod, Mass., a place that offers a host of interesting weather features.

“On a good day — a summer day — you can see the Prudential Center from here,” said Cappucci, as he explained that he did his work for the first few weeks on the roof of the Science Center. By Alana M Steinberg

“We have a little bit of everything,” he says. “Thunderstorms, tornadoes, droughts, severe weather—I think that’s what really kind of kindled my interest in meteorology.”

His encyclopedic knowledge of the subject is largely self-taught. Cappucci’s first formal training came at a meteorology camp he attended in ninth grade.

“The best experience was just to be around 11 other kids who shared my passion,” Cappucci recalls. “Whenever it was thundering, we’d all run outside. We’d all be tracking the radar.”

Running after storms has remained a part of Cappucci’s life. He lists storm chasing as one of his extracurricular passions. He tells me that storm chasing, which sometimes involves standing outside in 80 miles per hour winds or following tornadoes, is not as scary or difficult as many people think.

“If you know the science, if you know what you’re doing, you shouldn’t be caught off guard,” he says. “There are too many amateurs clogging up the roads.”

During high school, classmates and teachers depended on Cappucci for snow day predictions. He could usually call a snow day at least three days in advance, and was correct nine out of 10 times last winter. Cappucci pulls out his phone and shows me a collage of all-caps Facebook messages—he received more than 150 complaints after his one slip-up.

At Harvard, Cappucci has already begun to design his specialized concentration, Atmospheric Sciences, although he is still searching for a faculty advisor. He is cross-registered at MIT, where he’s currently taking a course.

At age 15, Cappucci presented at the annual conference of the American Meteorological Society; he was the youngest presenter in the convention’s history. Unsurprisingly, Cappucci’s end goal is to be a full-time weather reporter on television. Even in a casual conversation at Greenhouse Cafe, he speaks at prime-time speed and gesticulates as if there’s a map of the United States behind him.

Cappucci’s dream of a full-time job on television isn’t far out of his reach. With the production team at the Hauser Studio, he films his forecasts weekly. He was also recently hired as a field reporter for WeatherNation TV, a Colorado-based channel, and reports on some storms in the Boston area.

“I was out for six or seven hours the other day covering the snowstorm as it was moving in on top of the I-90 overpass,” Cappucci recalls. “I was standing there in the snow, but it’s what I love to do.”