Ahmad Bajjey’s fear of storms as a little boy was soothed by learning more about weather and following Detroit’s TV weathercasters.
“I felt safer watching the people on TV talking about it. I was listening to them and the way they were describing it and breaking things down. I was like, ‘They really know what they’re talking about,’” he recalls. “My parents mentioned: ‘You know what? You like to talk. Maybe you could be that!’”
His mother and father were on to something. Bajjey, 37, is chief meteorologist for the CBS Detroit, WWJ-TV (Channel 62), the network-owned and -operated station that relaunched its long-absent newscasts three years ago.
Bajjey is carrying on his family’s legacy of being ready to help people in harm’s way. Although he didn’t become a first responder like many of his relatives, he has found a career niche in giving viewers forecasts in good times and bad.
“Sometimes people, their darkest days are with the weather,” says Bajjey. “Several times, I’ve had people say, ‘Hey, you know I was really scared, but you helped me feel calmer or, at least, a bit more safe,’ or ‘I knew I was in the best place I could be from the information that you were providing.’”
Adds Bajjey: “That hits you. That kind of hits you in the soul when you hear stuff like that.”
A hometown boy
Since Jan. 23, 2023, CBS News Detroit has been introducing itself to southeast Michigan. The station had been out of the news business for more than 25 years and knew it was returning to a market that already had three long-established news teams: Fox 2 News (WJBK-TV, Channel 2), Local 4 News (WDIV-TV, Channel 4) and 7 Action News (WXYZ-TV, Channel 7).
Bajjey, who was part of that inaugural evening newscast, grew up in the market, something that he says informs his coverage and reflects the diversity of the cultures that call the state home.
He was born and raised in Dearborn by his mom, Mary, and dad, Hussein. They met decades ago at Briarwood Mall in Ann Arbor, where she was managing a Thom McAn shoe store and he was involved in building maintenance.
His mother’s heritage is French-Canadian and Irish, while his father is Lebanese-American. Growing up, Bajjey got to experience and appreciate both. “What was really nice was my mom was Roman Catholic and my dad was Muslim, so we would alternate every other Sunday, going between the mosque and the church,” he says.
Bajjey was named after his grandfather, “Ahmad Bajjey, the original,” whom he describes as “a bit of a legend in the Dearborn community.” Capt. Ahmad Bajjey, who died in 2020, rose through the ranks while serving with the Dearborn Fire Department from 1961 to 1997. He fought numerous significant fires, including the Ford Rotunda fire of 1962. He was “one of the first boots in the door,” says his grandson.
Two generation of the original Bajjey’s descendants have joined their patriarch in being Dearborn firefighters. The younger Bajjey’s father was a police officer in South Lyon and the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office before retiring from mall management.
Bajjey went in a different direction, driven by a passion for meteorology that began with being scared as a child. As a small child, he remembers with a laugh, the minute thunder and lightning started, he would “fly” to his parents room to sleep on the floor.
Bajjey’s first grade teacher at Dearborn’s Haigh Elementary School, Paula Nantau, recognized his interest in science and suggested that perhaps it would help to know what caused all that noise and those flashes of light. “She said: ‘Well, maybe you’re a little afraid of it because you want to understand it. It’s kind of scary. It’s loud. Let’s learn about it.”
Encouraged by his teacher, Bajjey started on the path of reading children’s books about the weather and became fascinated with the subject. In 2023, he reunited with Nantau for a CBS News Detroit story to thank her for inspiring his future career. Said Nantau on the air, “I’m just overwhelmed. It’s a teacher’s dream to have that sort of impact on a student’s life.”
Bajjey graduated from Dearborn High School and spent a year at Henry Ford Community College before transferring to Central Michigan University. He says CMU was “absolutely the best place for me” to learn the ins and outs of meteorology from faculty members like Martin Baxter, who remembers him as “really enthusiastic” about “communication to people who were vulnerable to severe weather.”
Baxter says Bajjey “really wanted to make a difference by being someone who could help save lives within his community, so I know it’s really special for him to be a meteorologist in the TV market in which he grew up.”
An eager intern
In 2012, Bajjey was a student intern at WDIV-TV, which gave him a chance to learn from his two favorite meteorologists who were then still at the station: Chuck Gaidica, known for his cheerful personality, and Paul Gross, a well-known whiz at the science of weather.
Bajjey says the opportunity was a blessing. “Interning with the two of them, my goodness, you walk away with an amazing idea of how to communicate in your voice, not in theirs. That’s what Chuck teaches you. And then the science and forecasting background that Paul teaches you. The two of them together made an unbelievable team.”
In December 2012, Bajjey, then a CMU junior, began doing fill-in work for Flint’s WEYI-TV. That led to a full-time job starting the summer of 2013 that meant spending his senior year commuting from Mt. Pleasant to Flint in order to do the weekend weather and three days a week of reporting at WEYI.
Bajjey spent nearly a decade on TV in Flint, earning a promotion to chief meteorologist during the COVID-19 pandemic. During that period, he taught CMU’s first broadcast meteorology course for two years and won a prestigious 10 Within 10 Award for recent alums who’ve made a difference at work and in their communities. For Bajjey, giving back — then in Flint, and now to Detroit — meant visiting schools to spread education and conducting severe weather training at fire departments.
In 2022, Bajjey was mulling his next career chapter and enjoying parental leave after the birth of his second child when CBS Detroit contacted him online to ask whether he had thought about coming to the Motor City. After messaging a reply, Bajjey had interviews the same week with the general manager and news director. ”I said: ‘Well, you know, I go back to work next week. Please let me know if you find me worthy to get the job.’ And they told me: ‘Oh no, no, this was just for us to get to know you. You have the job. Let’s talk contract.’”
As chief meteorologist, a promotion he received last year, and regular on the 5, 6 and 11 p.m. newscasts, Bajjey says he enjoys working with CBS News Detroit’s Next Weather team (as it’s called by the station) of Karen Carter, Stacey DuFord and Vytas Reid.
Delivering the forecast is “truly a 24/7 job” that requires going live whenever the conditions require it. The weather team won the argument with the station’s original management about needing such extended coverage, according to Bajjey, and now can count on support from the new managers that came on board in 2024, including station manager Kennan C. Oliphant, formerly with WXYZ-TV, and general manager Jennifer Lyons.
Recently, Bajjey debuted the Next Weathersphere, CBS Detroit’s new augmented reality/virtual reality proprietary technology used by CBS-owned and -operated stations. Essentially, it’s a studio that can visually immerse meteorologists in surrounding green-screen weather maps much larger than the flat map norm.
“The room is the screen…You’re in the environment,” says Bajjey, describing the experience. “What it really lends is the ability to put people into the forecast and say: ‘This is what’s going on. This is how vast of an area it covers.” Pointing to the fire on Seaway Island in Lake St. Clair a few weeks ago and the smoke and ash it generated, he says, “I was able to put a living fire with a location tag on the map in this 3D world and say, ‘Here’s where it is. … Look at how big it is and how much it’s covering.’”
Off camera, Bajjey and his wife, Cassie, whom he married in 2017 and describes as someone who inspires him every day, have a 6-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter. He recalls how on one of their early dates, a miniature golf outing, he wrote on the back of his scorecard afterward, “I’m going to marry this girl.” He saved the card and gave it to her on their wedding day.
“Hilariously enough, right before the ceremony, we had a severe thunderstorm right on top of the venue. But it cleared up in time for us to get married outside,” he says with a laugh.
Credibility matters
Weather forecasting is becoming more challenging for several reasons, among them the fact that staffing cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have resulted in a scaling back of weather balloon launches, which are vital to collecting data.
“That data not being in computer models has had a big effect on what you can and cannot trust from some of the data that’s going into it,” says Bajjey, who adds that meteorologists have to rely more on their professional and life experience in a given region.
He also worries about online sources that hype the weather and aren’t reliable, while citing the Michigan Storm Chasers as one online source he respects. Weather forecasting is all about the relationship of trust and respect with viewers, he notes. Bajjey credits former WDIV meteorologist Gross with stressing to him how crucial it is admit when a prediction doesn’t pan out and explain why to viewers.
“I’ve got swings and misses to rival the Tigers sometimes, but that’s part of the job. … If you screw up, you have to own it and you have to acknowledge it,” says Bajjey. “(You have to say) I got this wrong, but here’s why I got this wrong. … You have to show people this is what happened.”
In May, Bajjey received two nominations for the 2026 National Academy of Arts & Sciences Michigan Chapter Emmy Awards: one as part of the WWJ-TV team for a news special on the Ford world headquarters opening and one as part of the team for weather coverage on storm season safety. The winners will be announced June 13.
For the young boy who found comfort in weather science and grew up wanting to share his knowledge with others, being himself is always part of the forecast. Says Bajjey, “I’m a nerdy guy who loves to chat, but who just, at the end of the day, loves the weather. … I hope that’s what people get when they watch.”
Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: He was terrified of storms as a child. Now he’s a Detroit weatherman.
Reporting by Julie Hinds, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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By Julie Hinds, Detroit Free Press | USA TODAY Network
