The King of New Orleans Radio Weather
For decades, when a hurricane was coming, New Orleans turned to one man: Nash Roberts. While the National Weather Service issued official forecasts and the national news networks brought in their telegenic meteorologists, the people of New Orleans watched Nash. Because Nash was theirs, and Nash was usually right.
Roberts was born in New Orleans and spent his entire career in the city, working as a television meteorologist from the early days of local TV news. In an era before computer models and satellite imagery transformed weather forecasting into a high-tech enterprise, Roberts did his work the old-fashioned way—with hand-drawn maps, acetate overlays, grease pencils, and an intuitive understanding of Gulf weather that bordered on supernatural.
His method was famously analog. While younger meteorologists relied increasingly on computer models, Roberts sat at his desk with his hand-drawn charts and made predictions based on decades of experience watching how storms behaved in the Gulf of Mexico. His maps were works of art in their own way—precise, hand-lettered, and almost always more accurate than the official forecasts.
The legend of Nash Roberts was built on hurricane seasons. When a storm entered the Gulf, Roberts would appear on local television and tell people exactly where it was going. He called the track of Hurricane Betsy in 1965. He called Hurricane Camille in 1969. He called storm after storm with an accuracy that made the computer models look like guesswork. People planned their evacuations—or their decisions to stay—based on what Nash said.
His relationship with the city was something deeper than the usual bond between a TV personality and their audience. New Orleanians trusted Nash Roberts with their lives, literally. When he said evacuate, they evacuated. When he said a storm would miss the city, they stayed. That kind of trust was earned over decades of being right when being wrong could mean people died.
Roberts retired before Hurricane Katrina, and many people in New Orleans wondered what he would have said about the storm. Whether he would have seen what the models initially missed. Whether his hand-drawn maps would have shown the truth that the technology obscured. It's an unanswerable question, but the fact that people asked it tells you everything about what Nash Roberts meant to the city.
He was the last of his kind—a meteorologist who worked by instinct and experience in a field that has become entirely digital. In New Orleans, where people have always had to live with the knowledge that the next storm could be the one that changes everything, Nash Roberts was the voice that told them what was coming. The city never had a more trusted weatherman, and it never will again.
Leave a comment
All comments are moderated before being published.
This site is protected by hCaptcha and the hCaptcha Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.