DECATUR - Zach Melton can't remember a time when he wasn't fascinated by weather.

Thanks to the movie "Twister," his favorite weather event to study is tornadoes, and make no mistake, this Franklin School fifth-grader can describe every level of tornado, how much damage it might cause and what kind of wind speed to expect.

Zach, 11, has put together 37 booklets on weather phenomena. Many are devoted to tornadoes, but the others cover thunder and lightning, hail, snow, typhoons, floods, snow and ice and hurricanes. His goal is to create 100 weather books.

"It was (Illinois Standards Achievement Test) time, and when I was in the classroom (between tests), I just thought, 'Should I make a weather book or should I just draw pictures of me running around a field?' " Zach said.

The weather books won, and over the next four or five weeks, he produced the current crop. He considered career choices of meteorologist and storm chaser, but has settled on storm chaser.

"I'll be a storm chaser because meteorologist might be kind of hard to do," he said.

He's had help with a couple of his books from a classmate and from his reading buddy - at Franklin, older students are paired with younger ones for reading once a week, and sometimes Zach reads his own work to his kindergarten companion.

Zach already has been featured in Franklin's newsletter and in the district's newsletter, thanks to his weather books.

"He was scared of storms as a little kid," said Zach's mother, Melissa. "I don't know if it was us talking to him or what, but he started to get interested in weather, and (weather books) were the only books he wanted to check out (of the library)."

The Children's Museum of Illinois gave a presentation on weather a couple of years ago, she said, and Zach loved that. The museum personnel told his mother he was "a natural."

When the 100 books are done, Melton said, she's going to bind them into one book, as Zach wants to do, though at this point she hasn't yet come up with a way to do that.

"We'll figure something out," she said.

Valerie Wells can be reached at vwells@ herald-review.com or 421-7982.