NHC director Ken Graham with the 11 a.m. Friday update on Hurricane Dorian.
Ken Graham’s bio at NOAA
Ken Graham is the National Hurricane Center Director for NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS). Previously, he led the NWS Weather Forecast Office in the New Orleans/Baton Rouge region as the Meteorologist-in-Charge with responsibility for providing life saving forecasts and warnings to people living in the weather-vulnerable Gulf region.
As the meteorologist-in-charge in New Orleans, Graham led his team to serve 22 Louisiana parishes and eight Mississippi counties, and directly supported seven separate billion dollar loss weather events since 2008. He implemented innovative Impact-Based Decision Support Services during Hurricanes Gustav, Ike, Isaac, and Nate as well as Tropical Storm Cindy, the Baton Rouge Flood of 2016, Mississippi River floods, and several major tornado outbreaks. Graham worked to revamp the operational focus to working side-by-side with emergency managers and other decision makers during emergencies and each year, led nearly 100 training and exercise sessions with local, state, and Federal decision makers to prepare for hurricanes. For these efforts, Graham was honored with the Louisiana Governor’s Emergency Service Award in 2014.
During the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster, Graham led the cooperative intergovernmental engagement effort for NWS in the region and sustained Emergency Response Meteorologist deployments for more than five months while issuing more than 4,300 Spot Forecasts. His office received the National Weather Association’s Operational Meteorology Award, Department of Commerce Gold Medal for Decision Support Services, and was the National Weather Museum’s Meteorologist of the Year for support during the oil spill.
In addition to his role as the meteorologist-in-charge in New Orleans, Graham served as the Systems Operations Chief at Southern Region Headquarters and as the Chief of Meteorological Services at NWS headquarters. He was also the meteorologist-in-charge at NWS forecast offices in Corpus Christi, Texas and Birmingham, Alabama. Graham began his National Weather Service career as an Intern Forecaster in New Orleans in 1994.
Graham served twice as Chairman of the New Orleans Federal Executive Board and was elected a board member of the Louisiana Emergency Preparedness Association, member of the National Weather Association, and American Meteorological Society.
Graham received a Bachelor’s of Atmospheric Science Degree at the University of Arizona, and attended Mississippi State University where he earned a Master of Science Degree in Geosciences. While in Mississippi, he was a television meteorologist for CBS and an agricultural meteorologist for Mississippi Network Radio. Graham, a licensed HAM Radio Operator, looks forward to the move to Florida with his wife and three teenage daughters. His family enjoys camping, spending time at his oldest daughter’s band activities, and many weekends at the softball park with his twin daughters.
