Alexandra Cranford is a meteorologist at WWL-TV in New Orleans, Louisiana, specializing in forecasting for the New Orleans area and in the tropics.
Alexandra is a Certified Broadcast Meteorologist (CBM) awarded by the American Meteorological Society.
Alexandra has won awards including Best Weathercast in Louisiana from the Associated Press and Best Weathercast in New Orleans from the Press Club of New Orleans. Alexandra has also received awards from the Louisiana Association of Broadcasters and Women in Media.
She holds a Master of Science in applied meteorology from Mississippi State University. She graduated summa cum laude from Louisiana State University with a Bachelor of Arts in political communication.
As a native of the New Orleans area, Alexandra learned early that weather has a tremendous effect on people's lives. She grew up in Slidell on the Northshore and rode out almost every hurricane in her house with her family.
"We would board up the house, settle in and watch the WWL meteorologists as long as we could," she said. "When the power went out, we kept listening to them on WWL radio. It is an honor to be on the other side of that now and keep people safe and informed during our many severe weather events."
Alexandra has worked as a NASA Science and Engineering Apprentice in the Naval Research Laboratory's Office of Oceanography. She came to WWL-TV in 2012 from weather forecasting jobs in Monroe and Shreveport, Louisiana.
Her research study 'Women Weathercasters: their education, positions and presence in local TV' was published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in February 2018. It is the largest known biographical study of television weathercasters in the United States.
She always enjoyed science, but it wasn't until college that Alexandra chose meteorology as a career. Her love of English and reading led her to mass communication courses and LSU's campus broadcast news station. When she began dabbling in weather forecasting for the university-wide newscasts, she realized she had found a satisfying intersection of science and English.
Outside of work, Alexandra spends a lot of her time reading (classics and science fiction are her favorites). She also bakes, rides her bike and goes for lengthy walks in almost all types of weather.
