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And, of course, many weather forecasters worked overtime predicting and reporting on those storms. One of the most accurate? A group of students and their teacher/advisor, Richard Foot.

The two groups couldn’t be more disparate: The high-schoolers hail from Crossroads Center, an alternative school in White Marsh; the undergrads, from Penn State. But they predicted 24.7 inches of snow for BWI on December 18-19, 2009. Actual amount: 23.2 inches.

Not bad.

The prediction was shared via Foot’s Forecast (www.footsforecast.org), a website run collaboratively by Foot and his students.

Currently a teacher-in-residence at the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, Foot first brought weather forecasting into the classroom while teaching physical science at Crossroads.

Some of the students showed a keen interest; soon, they began making their own predictions. Around the same time, students from Penn State came on board, too. Foot credits then-junior Zak Brisko at Penn State with presenting the unified statement about major climate change that would come between Nov. 15 and Dec. 5, 2009. The group also got the February 2010 storms right.

And proving the adage that nothing succeeds like success, the continuing accuracy of Foot’s Forecast has helped its online popularity grow exponentially. Hits jumped from 750,000 in all of 2009 to over 2.5 million from February to October of 2010.

As for Foot, although he’s thrilled about the site’s popularity, he’s even more enthusiastic about how much his kids have achieved.

“You expect college students and adults to know their stuff. It’s more exciting when high school students can do it well,” he says. “I’m very proud of them. You just don’t know which average-looking 10th-grader is going to turn out to be really something.”