A Halifax teen has combined his math skills and fascination with severe weather to develop an equation that could save lives in the event of a tornado.

Robert MacDonald, 17, has been captivated by severe weather since he witnessed water spouts off the coast of Prince Edward Island at the age of nine.

“Just watching those almost surreal tornadoes touch down over water really sparked my interest into how these are forming and how they really work,” says MacDonald.

The teen has since completed over a dozen meteorology courses online in his spare time and has conducted exhaustive research into tornadoes.

“I watched over the years many tornado outbreaks just completely devastate whole towns and cities in the U.S. and I figured there must be an easier way to predict these storms earlier,” he says.

MacDonald studied current parameters to predict tornadoes and added his own improvements, taking into account fluctuations involving surface moisture.

The result? A logarithmic equation MacDonald says can predict tornadoes days in advance, instead of just hours.

His work garnered a gold medal at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in May.

“I couldn’t believe I had won this award. I was just absolutely mind blown.”

MacDonald hasn’t decided what he wants to do after high school, but his science-fair win has opened many doors; it came with a scholarship offer from five Canadian universities, including Dalhousie, Western and the University of British Columbia.

His parents, Cathy and David, say they could tell early on that his mind worked on a different level than most.

“I could never take him to a movie, a little kid movie with my friends,” says Cathy. “He didn’t like them. It had to be a technical movie of some sort.”

“He was going into Grade Primary and he could see the three-dimensional and how things were interrelated,” says David.

MacDonald says he has tested his equation this tornado season, and against 3,500 previous storms, with consistent results.

“So maybe I could develop a program that can easily just compute out a given value or an estimation of the strength of the particular tornadoes on a given day,” he says.

For now, he’s focusing on Grade 12, which he starts next week.

With files from CTV Atlantic's Jayson Baxter