Alexandra Steele recalls finding herself in the worst spot when a weather siren went off: the golf course.

A wide-open space, metal stick in her hand and lightning in the area.

Elissa Eubanks/AJC (ENLARGE)

Weather Channel anchor Alexandra Steele prepares to putt during a charity tournament supporting Girls Inc.

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The sane quickly seek cover.

Steele, a prime-time anchor for the Atlanta-based Weather Channel, took a look at the clouds — and hit her next shot.

"I've done that a couple of times," she admits during a recent round.

The long Georgia drought brings no threat of rain on this day, just five hours in record-setting heat before she reports to work.

"That's bad to say, isn't it? I tell people to go in and I don't go in myself. Do what I say and not what I do."

She laughs and shrugs. She's having fun and being honest.

Here, outdoors, the secret life of a glamorous meteorologist reveals itself. A weather girl — her description — needs a place to let her hair down, and hers is the golf course.

She's playing at Bradshaw Farms in Woodstock, in an all-women's charity golf tournament in early June. Like her, this course is short, pretty — and surprising.

The tournament benefits Girls Inc., which helps young females get a good start in life and avoid pregnancy.

Steele, 39, is due in October.

She got engaged last month — to an importer she met at a golf event. He proposed on a vacation to Thailand that included playing golf and some weather tourism: They visited where the tsunami hit.

She's so small — size 0 and an alleged 5-foot-4 — that only recently has she told friends she is with child. Otherwise, who could tell?

"This is my first pregnancy ensemble," she says of her black pants, green tank and black see-through top.

The day will hit 93 degrees, a record high. Despite that and the furnace of pregnancy, Steele barely breaks a sweat.

Between swings, she talks about moving into her first house, and she forecasts more great change for 2008. In a few days, the Weather Channel would switch to high-definition, and the new cameras "make me look 14 times wider," she says. "My fiancé tells me, 'Great time to be pregnant!' "

A sense of adventure guided her to weather work and this sport, both defined by the skies above.

"Golf is so interesting because you see so many places, like mountain courses," she says, shading her face with a cowboy hat she got at a Colorado golf pro shop. Her bag carries souvenir tags from courses in Sea Island and Palm Beach. "I love all the trees, topography and microclimates," she says. "And the cute golf clothes."

Adds some pizazz

That adventurousness joined with her ease of mixing girly with brainy, style with data. One minute she's loving a new line of golf clothes called Birdy & Grace, the next pondering a doctorate in climatology.

She doesn't swear, but she turns heads by dropping a few "behooves" and "begets." An Ivy League baby, Steele majored in art and architecture at Brown (her dad's alma mater; her mother went to Cornell and became a newspaper writer in Manhattan). She got a network job in London and attended graduate school for journalism in Chicago.

As a TV reporter in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., she was asked to fill in for the forecaster who got sick and add some pizazz. She loved it.

"It's fun, taking the same information that everyone has, doping it out and telling the story differently," she says. "That's the art of what we do: Being engaging and making the weather interesting."

She studied thermodynamics, hydrology and other hard sciences to get a seal of approval from the American Meteorological Society.

"I didn't just want to be the pretty weather girl," she says. "I wanted to be legit."

Working at night means days of golf. Other Weather Channel stars such as Jim Cantore, Paul Goodloe and Marshall Seese play a lot. Any type of hot streak — in weather, in golf — depends on a persistent pattern of conditions.

"A ridge of high pressure is in control of the Southeast, creating a false mountain that the rain in the Midwest and North can't get up and over," Steele says of the summer heat wave. "Drought begets drought just like playing [golf] well begets playing well."

Secrets to security

Her work has its dark side — the lonely men who get too attached to the 24-hour babes on her channel. To keep stalkers away, the Weather Channel building in Cobb County is unmarked.

Viewers have no access to her e-mail and can't send her letters or packages. She does not reveal where she lives, allowing only its proximity to a country club.

She finds peace on the course. She shoots in the 90s but has the tools to go much lower. Despite being so petite, she hits her Callaway driver 250 yards.

The source of her strength, she says, is a well-developed backside.

"I get my butt into it! I've got more power than touch. Someone once told me I had the touch of Roberto Duran — the boxer!"

She defies that on the ninth hole. With a sweetgum blocking her line to the flag 40 yards away, she sails aloft over the tall tree. The ball nestles 6 feet from the hole.

That leads to a birdie 3.

It stands recorded, like the low temperature of a certain day, the sum of a unique tale.

A few hours later, she'll tease from the numbers why Atlanta sweltered so much this day and what's next.

A hot round of golf by day begets another night of heat reporting at the Weather Channel.