THOMASVILLE - Rob Nucatola's enthusiasm for his job just might influence some Brookwood School 7th graders to consider studying meteorology for their career.
The WCTV weatherman visited Brookwood on Sept. 15 to speak to Forrest Boone's Western Hemisphere class. The energetic meteorologist fielded questions from the middle school students regarding his professional life, education and the challenges in reporting the weather.
Nucatola holds two bachelor degrees plus a master's and, besides his long hours at the TV station, he teaches a class at Tallahassee Community College. He told the students that science and math are crucial to understanding and forecasting changes in the weather.
"I was in the 9th grade when I came to the realization that I could never be a professional hockey player," Nucatola told the class. "About that time I saw a movie that had a TV meteorologist as one of the characters, and I thought that looked like a good career for me."
He grew up in New York City, and his first jobs were in Maine, so transferring to the North Florida & South Georgia TV station gave him an opportunity to cover different kinds of weather, including reporting on-site along the coast during several hurricanes.
His "fun days," Nucatola explained, are those days with "lots of tropical weather or thunderstorms, blizzards and snow storms."
While constantly moving around the front of the classroom, he fielded a variety of questions from the students about hurricane names, his work hours, his most embarrassing on-air moments, short-and long-range forecasting, computer-generated weather maps, television chromakey use, and the difference between hurricanes and tornadoes. He talked about the timing of lightening and thunder, which involved an explanation regarding the speed of light vs. the speed of sound.
The 7th graders are maintaining hurricane-tracking charts as part of their class work. Hearing from a working meteorologist helped put their study of weather into a practical perspective.
