Head in the Clouds

“I can’t turn it off.”

Even when he’s on vacation, Spencer Adkins, CAS ’89, can’t seem to get his head out of the clouds.

“My family laughs at me. We go on vacation or to the beach, and they have all these pictures of me just staring off into the distance,” jokes Adkins. “They even put a video together to Sarah McLaughlin music and said, ‘you, too, can adopt a meteorologist.’”

Spencer Adkins

Adkins is the chief meteorologist for the news station WOWK, where he’s been since 1993, providing snowfall predictions and keeping viewers updated on severe weather, on-air and on social media, for Kentucky, West Virginia and Ohio.

His journey started as an anchor in the smallest market, Alpena, Michigan, in the late ’80s.

“I got hired before cell phones,” Adkins laughed. “I finished my last exam. I couldn’t believe it. I was done and it was time to start my life. Literally that day, my landline rings. It was a guy in Alpena, Michigan, offering me a job.”

Spencer Adkins

From there, he bounced around as a news anchor to West Virginia and Illinois before landing back in West Virginia at WOWK. With his focus still set on becoming a sports reporter, he was approached about going back to school to become a meteorologist. Adkins enrolled at Mississippi State doing distance learning for three years to earn his broadcast meteorology certificate before taking over as chief meteorologist for WOWK.

Adkins’ passion for weather is palpable, making his forecasts memorable through humor both in front of a camera and through his memes on X, while also keeping his viewers in the know. He credits that to his professors at Oakland University.

“I had a lot of great teachers,” says Adkins. “One was John Rhadigan, who went out of his way to teach us how to be reporters; we all wanted to be him. There was also Neal Shine, the head of the Detroit Free Press, and the stories we had access to through him and Jane Briggs-Bunting. I was lucky to get a lot of hands-on experience from great people.”

You can experience Adkins’ weather reports on his socials: Facebook, X