At 17, Scott Pecoriello has built a reputation with an app that Connecticut residents can turn to for important information.
The brainchild of the high school junior, who has a passion for weather research, is Know Snow, which predicts school delays and closings in Fairfield County three to four days before a storm with 90 percent accuracy.
Pecoriello began building the app last October and finished in December. One of his most difficult tasks was getting Know Snow into the Apple store. Now that it's there, it has about 800 users and is available for free on Android and iOS.
He started a blog, Wild about Weather, in 2011 with just 12 followers—mainly family members. Since then, it and his public Facebook page have garnered 16,000 followers, with more every second, according to Pecoriello. And his map of the most recent storm reached 2.1 million people.
"I got called out in every direction for the prediction of this storm," he said. "People were telling me I was wrong, but I was spot on!"
Right now, Pecoriello spends a lot of time researching and making maps using computer forecasting models, though his future may not necessarily involve meteorology.
After all, he has time to figure it out.
—By Christina Medici Scolaro