Al Roker

Albert Lincoln Roker Jr. was born on August 20, 1954, in Queens, New York City, the son of Isabel, a woman of Jamaican descent, and Albert Lincoln Roker Sr., a bus driver of Bahamian descent. Raised Catholic in accordance with his mother's faith, Roker graduated from Xavier High School in Manhattan. As a young person he had aspirations of becoming a cartoonist. He went on to attend the State University of New York at Oswego, earning a Bachelor of Arts in communications in 1976. While still enrolled there, he worked as a weather anchor at CBS affiliate WHEN-TV in Syracuse and also DJ'd at the campus radio station, WNYO.

After completing his degree, Roker relocated to Washington, D.C., where he took a weathercasting position at independent station WTTG, then under Metromedia ownership, for roughly two years. His career with NBC began in 1978 when he joined WKYC in Cleveland, an NBC owned-and-operated station at the time. During his years in Cleveland, Roker and his first wife, Mary Puglisi, whom he had married on the day they graduated from SUNY Oswego in 1976, spoke publicly about their experiences in an interracial marriage. The couple later divorced. In December 1984, Roker married WNBC producer Alice Bell, and together they adopted a daughter, Courtney, as an infant in 1987. That marriage also ended in divorce. On September 16, 1995, Roker married television journalist Deborah Roberts. They have two children together: a daughter, Leila, born November 17, 1998, and a son.

After five years in Cleveland, Roker was promoted to WNBC-TV in New York City, returning to his hometown in late 1983 as a weekend weathercaster. Within eight months he had become the station's regular weeknight weathercaster, succeeding Dr. Frank Field, a 27-year WNBC-TV veteran who departed over a contract dispute. From 1983 to 1996, Roker served as a regular substitute for forecaster Joe Witte on NBC News at Sunrise, and from 1990 to 1995 filled in for Willard Scott and Bryant Gumbel on the Today show, continuing to substitute for Matt Lauer through the 2000s. An appearance on Late Night with David Letterman, in which Letterman invited Roker to participate in an elevator race, brought him broader public recognition and led to his role as forecaster for Weekend Today. In 1995, he also became host of The Al Roker Show, a weekend talk show on CNBC.

When Scott announced his semi-retirement from Today in early 1996, Roker assumed the regular weekday weather slot on January 26 of that year. His segments, which often involved interviewing visitors outside the studio and giving them on-camera time, became a recurring feature of the broadcast. He also continued the daily tradition of birthday wishes to centenarians that Scott had established. In 2005, Roker reported from inside Hurricane Wilma, and footage of him being swept off his feet by the wind while clinging to a cameraman became widely circulated. Beginning November 12, 2012, he co-hosted the third hour of Today, called Today's Take, which ran until its final episode on September 22, 2017. After Megyn Kelly Today was cancelled in 2018, Roker returned to co-host the reconstituted 3rd Hour Today. He holds a lapsed American Meteorological Society Television Seal of Approval, number 238.

Among his record-setting endeavors, Roker conducted a "Rokerthon" in November 2014, delivering a non-stop 34-hour weather forecast on NBC beginning at 10:05 p.m. on November 12 and concluding around 8:00 a.m. on November 14, as a fundraiser benefiting the military and the USO through the Crowdrise Campaign. A second event, "Rokerthon 2," took place from November 6 to 13, 2015, during which he reported weather from all 50 states and Washington, D.C. in support of Feeding America. From March 27 to 31, 2017, "Rokerthon 3" brought him to college campuses, where he set Guinness World Records including the longest conga line on ice and the largest human letter. Roker has hosted NBC's coverage of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade since 1995, with the exception of 2022, when he was recovering from blood clots that had required hospitalization. His role at the parade includes cutting the ribbon at the start of the event and interviewing celebrities along the route beginning at 77th Street.

Roker's television work has extended across multiple platforms and formats. From 1996 to 1997, he hosted the MSNBC game show Remember This?, and in March 2007 he substituted for Meredith Vieira for a week of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. In 2008, he hosted NBC's Celebrity Family Feud, and he has appeared as a celebrity contestant on both Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune. He hosted food and travel programs on Food Network, including Roker on the Road and Tricked-Out Tailgating, and from 2009 to 2015 hosted Wake Up with Al, a weekday morning program on The Weather Channel airing from 5:00 to 7:00 a.m. He provided weather forecasts for radio stations including New York's WQCD and Cleveland's WNWV through a service called the Al Roker Radio Weather Network, distributed by United Stations Radio Networks. In September 2025, the animated PBS Kids series Weather Hunters, which Roker created, premiered; he also voices the character Al Hunter, the father of the show's protagonist, Lily Hunter. The series targets children ages five through eight and focuses on elementary weather science.

As an author, Roker co-wrote a series of murder mysteries with Dick Lochte beginning in 2009, centered on a character named Billy Blessing, a celebrity chef who becomes an amateur detective. The second book in the series, The Midnight Show Murders, published in 2010, received a nomination for the 2011 Nero Award. Another title in the series, The Morning Show Murders, also published in 2010, was adapted into a 2018 Hallmark Movies and Mysteries film starring Holly Robinson Peete. In 2016, Roker and his wife Deborah Roberts co-authored the non-fiction book Been There, Done That: Family Wisdom for Modern Times.

Roker's Broadway career spans from 2003 to 2016 and includes appearances in Waitress and The Play What I Wrote. On May 22, 2003, he made a cameo as the Mystery Guest Star in The Play What I Wrote. He was announced on September 5, 2018, as portraying the character Joe in the musical Waitress for a six-week run from October 5 to November 11 of that year, and he returned to the production for a limited run from November 1 to 24, 2019. On December 19, 2023, he appeared in a one-night-only cameo as the Producer in Gutenberg! The Musical!, and on March 28, 2024, he played Strickland in Back to the Future: The Musical on Broadway. Roker was born and raised in Queens, New York.