Tampa Meteorologist Andy Johnson Dies at 68

Andy Johnson, the Tampa-area meteorologist whose 34-year television career made him a fixture in one of the nation’s largest media markets, died Thursday after a battle with cancer. He was 68.

Johnson retired from WTVT-TV, Fox 13 in Tampa, in 2013, but he never really stepped back. Through his consultancy, Johnson Forensic Meteorological Consulting, which he founded in Tampa in 1997, he continued shaping how the region understood and prepared for severe weather. When hurricanes threatened the Gulf Coast in recent years, Johnson’s social media presence became a trusted clearinghouse for no-nonsense updates, cutting through the noise at precisely the moments when panic tends to spread.

His connection to weather was not professional curiosity. It was something closer to a personal debt. As a child, Johnson and his family evacuated their home ahead of a major hurricane. That experience set the course of his life. He built a weather station in his home, and at age 7 he visited the WTVT Weather Service, where he met meteorologist Roy Leep, who would become his mentor. He went on to earn a Bachelor of Science in meteorology with honors distinction from Florida State University.

What followed was a 43-year career that he approached, by all accounts, with both technical rigor and genuine enthusiasm. He distinguished himself early. In 1979, Johnson implemented and customized the first all-digital television computer graphics system in the nation, operating under the McIDAS banner developed at the University of Wisconsin. That kind of technical ambition was a thread that ran through his entire career.

His professional honors reflected the breadth of that career. In 2023, the American Meteorological Society named him a Fellow, and he became one of only 10 individuals worldwide to hold all four AMS certifications. He served the organization for nearly two decades as president of one of its most active chapters.

The Tampa community offered its own formal recognition before those national honors arrived. Then-Mayor Bob Buckhorn and the Hillsborough Board of County Commissioners declared January 29, 2013, to be “Andy Johnson Day.” Later that year, then-Gov. Rick Scott sent Johnson a letter acknowledging his decades of contributions and service to the region.

Mentorship was not an afterthought for Johnson. He actively sought out students and met them on their own terms, tailoring conversations to individual goals rather than delivering a standard stump speech about the field. He spoke candidly about his own path, including its detours and uncertainties. Former students and younger meteorologists across the region have credited him with shaping careers that might otherwise have gone a different direction.

That combination of public-facing work, private sector consulting, and active mentorship gave Johnson an unusual footprint across the meteorology community. He did not pick a lane and stay in it. His private practice in forensic meteorology, which applies weather science to legal and insurance matters, operated alongside his television work for years before he retired from broadcasting. After 2013, the consultancy became his primary professional focus, though his public presence remained very much alive.

Johnson’s career spanned a period of sweeping change in how weather information reaches the public. He arrived on Tampa television in an era when viewers scheduled their lives around the evening forecast, and he was still engaged and trusted decades later in a media environment that looked almost nothing like the one he had entered. That kind of sustained relevance is not common.

The American Meteorological Society, the Tampa Bay television community, and the broader South Florida and Gulf Coast weather-watching public are all diminished by his passing. Johnson spent 68 years understanding that weather is not an abstraction. It displaces families, redirects lives, and demands clear communication from those who can read it. He took that responsibility seriously from the time he was a child in an evacuating car, and he never set it down.

Services and memorial details had not been publicly announced as of Friday morning.