Ken Graham is NOAA’s Assistant Administrator for Weather Services and the Director of the National Weather Service (NWS). He has served as the NWS Director since June 2022. As NWS Director, Mr. Graham is responsible for the overall leadership of the NWS and ensuring the day-to-day civilian weather operations for the United States, its territories, adjacent waters, and ocean areas. His strategic areas of focus include transforming the way Americans receive, understand, and act upon NWS information; ensuring NWS decision support services are equitably delivered across all communities, and advancing partnerships across the weather enterprise to reduce the impacts of extreme weather, water, and climate events.

Prior to becoming the 17th NWS Director, he served as the director of NOAA’s National Hurricane Center (NHC), leading the nation through numerous hurricanes, including 30 named storms during the record-breaking 2020 hurricane season. His tireless energy to build effective partnerships at all levels of government and his close work with emergency managers underpin the nation’s preparedness ahead of hazardous weather.

Graham is the first NWS director with a vast amount of operational field experience. He worked his way up through the ranks at NWS, mostly in field offices, starting as an intern meteorologist in 1994 at the New Orleans/Baton Rouge weather forecast office.

Before his tenure at NHC, he led the New Orleans/Baton Rouge weather forecast office as the Meteorologist-in-Charge with responsibility for providing life-saving forecasts and warnings to the weather-vulnerable Gulf region. In this role, he directly supported seven separate billion-dollar loss weather events and implemented innovative Impact-Based Decision Support Services during hurricanes, floods, and tornado outbreaks. 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.

He also previously served as the Systems Operations Chief at NWS Southern Region Headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas, and as the Chief of Meteorological Services at NWS Headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland. He was also the meteorologist-in-charge at NWS forecast offices in Corpus Christi, Texas and Birmingham, Alabama.

Graham earned a bachelor’s degree in atmospheric science from the University of Arizona and a master’s degree in geoscience from Mississippi State University.

Graham, a licensed HAM Radio Operator, is a member of the American Meteorological Society, the National Weather Association, and the International Association of Emergency Managers.