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Anthony Slaughter discusses the Earth’s water cycle with Cold Water students.

Third-grade students at Cold Water Elementary School in the Hazelwood School District packed into Stephanie Knight’s classroom in anticipation of a special visitor.

As he entered the room, students smiled and some waved at Anthony Slaughter. Slaughter, 26, a District alumnus, is a meteorologist with KSDK-TV Channel 5, St. Louis’ NBC affiliate. He came to review the importance of Earth’s water cycle.

First, he told the students about some of his background, that he attended Jury and Townsend elementary schools, graduated from Hazelwood East High and went on to attend the University of Missouri-Columbia.

“Mizzou’s a good journalism school,” he told the students. “In fact, it’s number one in journalism right now so if you’re interested in news, you should go there after you finish high school.”

Slaughter talked about passion and the importance of finding a job that you look forward to doing on a daily basis.

“It’s very important to follow what you love,” he said. “If it’s not out there; create it. When I was 7 years old, I knew I wanted to become a weatherman. I didn’t know how I was going to do it but I wanted to do it. If you have an interest in weather, study it. That’s what I did.”

In his presentation, he talked to the students about the cycle of evaporation and condensation that occurs daily in the world. He reviewed that evaporation occurs when sunlight warms a body of water and that cold air is denser than warm air. He talked about cloud types and different types of precipitation. Everyone in the room knew about rain but Slaughter talked about the difference among freezing rain, sleet, snow and hail.

“There’s a difference between sleet and hail,” Slaughter explained. Sleet are small pellets of ice that typically occur here in the fall or winter while hail is usually a spring and summer phenomenon and varies in size from that of a pea to a softball and can cause damage and injuries, he explained.

After his presentation, he answered weather-related questions from the students.

“How does lightning in a thunderstorm form?” a boy asked. After Slaughter explained the process, he added that the process that causes static electricity is similar so stat is a much less powerful form of lightning.

“How do you know if lightning is far or close?” someone asked. He described the five-second rule, in which a person sees lightning flash then counts the number of seconds until he or she hears the thunder. Divide the number of seconds by five to calculate the estimate distance of the bolt. For example, if 18 seconds elapse until the thunder sounds, the lighting is approximately 3.6 miles away.

Slaughter used the chalkboard to show how tornadoes form, showing rotating winds and inflow and outflow from the thunder clouds. “I love this question!” he told the group. He stayed at the board to illustrate how hurricanes form, starting as tropical depressions over warm ocean water.

“What it like working at Channel 5?” a student wanted to know.

“Working at Channel 5 is like a dream,” he replied. “I applied on a whim and I didn’t think I would get hired. When I was in school, I looked at the sky a lot and I would tell people it would rain on Thursday, for example, and they would say, ‘What? Go sit down little boy!’”

When Slaughter tells viewers it may rain on a Thursday now, most people believe him.

(story courtesy of the Hazelwood School District Communications Dept.)

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