inter to introduce ms.. matthew cappucci and he is a self-proclaimed natural disaster and has lived a tempestuous life beyond chasing storms. he began presenting it and writing for local newspapers at age 14 and attended harvard university, where he created his own special concentration, an atmosphere sciences the first ever in the institution is 400 year history. a meteorologist for the post matthew does routine forecasts on npr, canada, ctv news network during hurricanes makes international television appearances during tornado and wildfire episodes and serves as a frequent u.s. see tropical weather expert for bbc news. he also is an on air meteorologist at fox five in washington, dc a passionate advocate for introducing children and young people to the joy of science. he works part time as an education and college admissions consult and has delivered motivational speeches around the world and is a regular on sirius xm children's place and he still made time to come to fall for the books. so matthew, thank you so much. well, thank you and thank you. guys are showing up i'm just so happy people actually came to this so much. appreciate it. i guess if you notice red stripe on my sunglasses, i'm so mad because two days ago i lost my good sunglasses for the third time. and this time i don't think actually coming back. so these are dollar tree brand much like pretty much everything else i am. but we're here to discuss looking up, which is my new book and hopefully some of read it by show. you did. okay, great. so one person did. so for those who didn't, we won't give too many spoilers, but in any case, there's a lot to talk about now, as i'm sure you probably guessed. i love pretty much every waking hour of my day and some of the sleeping hours of my day are all made up doing weather as it is. tomorrow night i'm working the evening news. i'll sleep at the station behind the greenscreen. i'll do the morning news again monday morning. so i a very busy schedule and yet i love it because i work five or six different weather jobs and each one i enjoy in a different way. so one of the other jobs and i obviously work for fox five, i do the weather here in d.c. i work for the washington post. i work for npr. i do radio for them. i've been doing some stuff with npr nationally lately. i work for an app in florida called my, which if you don't have it, it's a good app i work for someone else, but i forget who. and then i. i don't sleep much. and as we all know. and then i also work as an educational consultant for a company up in boston, so it keeps me busy and i love it. now that my radar job lets me do storm chasing from that from time to time. and i was actually down in florida two weeks ago for the hurricane. i'm sure you all saw hurricane ian was in the news. so i took a week off from fox five, flew down there and i was there for about five days before the storm, which meant preparing, getting ready, doing forecasts from 311 each night and doing social media and all that stuff. and then actually came to chase the storm, which initially we were forecasting would come ashore as a high category two. now, who's been in a hurricane, which one? it was so. which category where were you? connecticut oh, okay yeah, possible. and carol, to think about that 75 or 76. okay. i think i forget the name, but it was like a cat two ish. anyone else? a hurricane? which one was this? and item named after? it actually was hurricane. oh, very cool. oh, nice standard that they go it's your day have i. i'll just tell folks hurricane gracie. in 1985 who else went on a good hurricane? anyone which one? you know. oh, my gosh. you are. you go. okay. so hugo came ashore as a pretty significant storm, but further inland, it quite as bad. but you know, ian we are forecasting to come ashore near the big bend of florida's like a high one low one category two. but it kept trending farther south and east, which meant it would have a better chance of coming ashore stronger before an approaching cold front would weaken its. because of that, i was forecasting high to low in category three. what actually wound up happening. it obviously came ashore in fort myers as a high end category four, but i was prepared to go into like a high to low end three the morning up, when i woke up and saw it was coming ashore as a high end category, i thought, well, this is going to be a little difference. so i had my rental car and my buddy and i stayed in sarasota the night before. i fell asleep at about 230, woke up around o'clock ish, so got a good two and a half hours and wound up. i wound up working all morning long doing couple of tv hits and then we positioned farther south to the town of venice on the west coast of florida about, say, 60 miles south of tampa, waited there for a little while and a cement parking structure for a couple of hours. and i determined we'd have to reposition farther south east, because the thing kept trending farther south and east. so we went to a place rotunda actually englewood, florida, near rotunda, which is just north of port charlotte. and we waited there a little while as the eyewall, the first edge of that inner donut of extreme winds circling the eye, began to come in. now, dry air wrapping into the storm kind of eroded the leading edge of the so made it a little bit weaker, not quite as strong, but we're there for a little while as i to reposition east again so we're going through winds of like 80 ish miles per hour give or take 90 miles an hour. and we kept seeing these pinpoint lightning strikes everywhere, which extremely unusual in the core of tropical cyclone, you rarely get thunderstorms, never mind one unbroken ring of thunderstorms. so we knew it was still maintaining strength, if not strengthening. then we crossed bridge into punta gorda. so a little bit south of port charlotte. there we got winds 110 miles an hour, saw the eye and the eye was cool. you know, we didn't have the clear, unfortunately. and then we thought, all right the leading edge is normally stronger. so let's just go back to the hotel in englewood. in doing so, what we had failed to consider along with many other meteorologists because it was a very rare setup, there was so extra precipitation, extra rain on the backside of the storm that helped to drag down momentum from aloft. we got significantly stronger winds. so we're driving back and i can see the edge of the eye walls were essentially going from here back into the worst part of the storm. and like this we got winds 100, then 110, then gusting to 120. as we're driving west towards this hotel, which is a cement structure, it's above sea level. and that surge be too big of an issue. what we didn't expect rainfall rates four plus inches per hour meant road in front of us began to flood. so we're driving west in this rental car. the road starts to flood. i don't mess with floodwaters at all. here's the thing. it's a flat area. it's flooding right of the road, just left of the road and flood waters are beginning to creep up over the road just like that. a power pole fell right in front of us and we couldn't slow down enough. so we lost the front. two tires. but we don't need tires. so we kept going onwards. who here has driven a vehicle with the front? two tires is gone. anyone? i'm not talking like a little saggy, little now. like just gone. so we kept driving west, my friend who is a meteorologist, but really storm chase before was beginning to panic a little bit and he's looking at me like, is this okay? i'm like, there's no routine. 9 to 5 way to drive into a category four. this is fine. i'll change a tire tomorrow. we only need a couple functioning tires. come to find out the back right tire went out too. so i just chugging along, going west again. he is losing his mind and i'm happy as a clam. i got the radio on the windshield wipers going back and forth. i'm drumming on the steering wheel because it takes a lot to phase me and we start driving the puddles become a little bigger, become flood waters, become now two feet of floodwaters. and when i saw that in the road. i was like, well, i can't go this way, but it was the only road that wasn't flooded. so we were forced to turn around and backtrack for safety as the winds are still going 100 to 120 miles an hour. and i know that we're not in the perfect situation, but i also don't want to freak out, my friend. it's like. it's fine. we'll just go back towards the bridge, you know, escape, surge, escape, whatever. so start going back east again. and we drive three and a half, almost four miles in the hundred 20 mile an hour winds with this vehicle. that has now one functioning tire. and i mean, it's doing the work of a solid one and a half tires. and we finally got back to a bridge where i call my dad. i'm like hey, how many times do we need to drive on? he's like, if the car moves, you're like, great. so we drive up and over the bridge to an apartment complex, which i deem a safe place structurally looks down. it's above the risk surge. i know the fresh water will flood most of the surrounding area, but it's up about two feet. so i think we're good and we settle underneath it. it's now getting dark. and he says, where are we going to go from here? like we're parking here for cozy up because you're here tonight. so we're there overnight. and the next morning i try to set up a starlink satellite because i was supposed to do the morning news via skype in dc and all cell service was down, satellite wasn't working, and overnight, of course, the roof of the apartment building ripped off. but we are underneath apartment building in a little garage area with vehicles on either side. and so i wound up i was very proud of my this is my most accomplishment here. i changed a tire all by myself, just me. and we change the tire. we got that fixed. so now we have two functioning tires. the back left is to just rubber in the back right. it's pretty saggy to. so we start driving back west towards hotel because that's where my colleague has his vehicle. we only made it about a mile before the tire, just fully peeled off, but that's okay. we kept charging onwards in the middle. apparently there's metal that surrounds the tire and that peeled off too and we got to winn-dixie and i said no more. so we wound up getting a ride the rest of the way back to his vehicle and and all was well. but that was my experience with hurricane ian. got some great data, great footage, great information and some good communication rental cars. well, anyway, so look, so looking up obviously i like the weather i'm passionate about whether i have pretty much as long as i can remember when i was about three or four years old, i was obsessed with the wind meters spinning on people's roofs. when i was seven, i saved my first communion money to buy a video camera so i could storm chase and i drive little fisher-price electric car all around the neighborhood in these thunderstorms. somehow i didn't get struck and i had a little walkie talkie and i radio my parents. okay, i'm in the cul de sac. i'm near roy's. i'm near a friend's house. i'm near mr. duties house, like. all right, don't get struck by lightning. and it's been like that ever since. when i was nine. i do the school over the p.a. system at indian brook elementary and do the weather periodically for field day and for everything else. when i was, gosh, 12 or 13 years old, i was really with waterspouts. and when i was 14, i applied to weather camp, which is a real thing. i grew up on cape cod, massachusetts, where we have winter storms. we don't have that much weather. but i was obsessed with all things weather, so i figured weather camp, i can find people like me and my mother. i mean, she's a saint, but she found weather camp at howard university in, d.c., and said, you've got to apply. so i did. they had 65 applicants. they took 12. and fortunately i was one of them. and it was all expenses paid for that, you know, room, board and everything. we just had to get down here. i had the bright idea of taking the megabus and you never taking the megabus okay, so a few folks know what this was like, the way my mother describes it as the only thing that was missing was a live. and essentially it's the bus showed up an hour late. they don't have a bus tracker. they don't have anything. and so we wait in south station and she's accompanying me down here, she's like, why the hell did you talk me into this? but the tickets were only $10 each. and lord knows we love bargain. so. so we're on this bus and you know, we leave late and it's all college students or folks who just wouldn't seem overly and sort of those are the two crowds. and as we're down there, we stop at a burger king in union, connecticut. so everyone can get out, stretch their legs and like we've been driving an hour, we keep driving. and apparently we lost a lady at the burger king. we only found by taking attendance about 30 minutes down the road. so we backtrack to union, connecticut picked her up, kept south something, happened with traffic in new york and then the toilet evidently overflowed all the first floor we had to stop in hoboken, new jersey. mind you, it's july, so we didn't have air conditioning either. they scoop all that out and. we keep checking south again and a fight broke out between two women in front of me when we passed baltimore. then someone tried to steal my watch and eventually we got to dc. by the time we got to dc, i was sufficiently terrified. i said, mom, you cannot leave me here. do not. if it's anything like the megabus. i had no idea how wonderful of a place dc is, nor that i would call it home. but i was petrified. i was like, i can't stay here. i was so nervous that morning to go to this weather camp that i couldn't even have my morning bacon at the breakfast buffet, which shows that i was petrified. so i go to this weather camp and, you know, i'm looking around. it's a bunch other kids and they all seem nerdy, too. but i was because i didn't know any of these people and. i had also just had my harrowing experience, megabus. and as we're sitting there, this guy in a hot air balloon shirt walks in and he looks like the male version of miss frizzle and he says, hi, ron, my name is mr. moseley's, wearing his big balloon shirt and i'm sitting there, he's talking. he seems like an eclectic fellow, super nice guy, but all of a sudden i jump upwards, something in my pocket is buzzing and i didn't have a buzz phone. i was not the pinnacle of technology. i didn't have a phone with me and something in my pocket is squealing and i'm panicking. like, what is it? people are looking at me and then i realize it's my noah weather alert radio we a severe thunderstorm watch and just like that all the kids immediately bonded we all realized we're equally excited about the severe thunderstorm watch. and then i was like, you know what? maybe won't be that bad. so i love the weather camp. over the course of two weeks and i loved it so much that i said i got to keep the same metrocard in case i live in dc someday and i still have that metro card. believe it or not, i have like others, and i never know which one has value, but one of these is the metro card. i think this is a metro card from south america, but you get the idea. one of them is the metro card. so any who at weather camp it was nice because they introduced to the american meteorological society and i was very fascinated with waterspouts and i'd been doing some work on waterspouts just basically trying to figure out how we can better predict or tornadoes over water that will have a tendency in eastern massachusetts to move offshore. and i came up with a little forecast method i shared with our local national weather service, and they said, hey, this is pretty good stuff. and we tweet sort of the severe thunderstorm warnings and the special marine warnings to include extra phrases to accommodate this threat. when we thought when we thought it would materialize and that summer after the weather camp just so happened that the american meteorology meteorological society was holding their broadcast their weather people conference in boston and somehow mike mogull arranged a for me to go there and i was like this. but it was great. everyone was super nice, but no one really talked to me because why is this 14 year old at the conference? so the next year was in nashville and i thought, i want to present to the conference. maybe then people will talk to me. and so my mother and i flew down in nashville. we did not take the megabus that time. fortunately, we learned our lesson. and i a presentation at the conference when i was signing up for this conference and submitting my stuff, they had a box for like a college student presenter and i was like, yeah, freshman, sophomore in high school, whatever. close. and they let me present and. it was wonderful and the people at the amos have been unbelievably kind ever since. and it helping meet so many great folks so down the road, you know i was trying to figure out what my next steps would after that and i was trying to figure out how i can sort of get my name there. and i figured maybe newspaper articles. so i started writing newspaper articles, my small town newspaper, remember plymouth, massachusetts it's not a big city. yes. the pilgrims landed, but that's about it. and we still don't know if it's actually that rock, plymouth rock band disappointing children's. sins 1620. and we took eight field trips there when i was elementary middle school. but anyhow, anyhow, i was, you know, trying to figure out how to sort of get the name out there. and i started writing for the local newspaper, the old colony memorial, and i didn't think anyone actually read my pieces because they're deeply i mean, the great management, they're great, you know, great. folks who sort of gave me a shot to write it wasn't a very widely circulated, but i wrote an article and 2013 called 75 years after the storm, which is a great about the great hurricane of 1938, which was a high end category three that slammed new cost. about 700 fatalities and essentially new england. but it happened around the same time that the events preceding world war one or world war two, rather, were getting going in europe. and so it didn't receive a ton of media attention, but it was enormously disastrous for new england. you actually houses with people on them. people were on their roofs and they were carried a 12 miles from long island to coastal connecticut. that's how bad that storm was, about an 18 foot storm surge in some parts of the world and southwest boston. the blue hill observatory got a wind gust to 186 miles per hour. so it was a bad storm. and i wrote this 75th anniversary piece about it, interviewing few old folks, including my great grandparents, who through that storm and they had a foreign exchange student actually disappear on her way home during the storm. so they had sort of that person. but i wrote an article about it and the next week there was a letter to the editor there in the paper saying, hats off to magic boogie, you know, signed by a guy named eric jay heller. i didn't know anything about him, but sent an email to my editor saying, hey, could you forward it to whoever wrote this letter? it was really thoughtful. i appreciate it. didn't think folks actually read these pieces. great. i made a brief exchange and that was that. that was 2013. and fast forward a couple of years, i keep going to these weather conferences and i'm trying to figure out my next steps for college. obviously, i wanted to be a meteorologist i wanted to get a meteorology degree. but the question was where there are just a few a few schools really good for tv meteorology. there's lyndon state up in vermont. phenomenal school. and i fell in love with it instantly when i toured there. there's cornell, great scho