Mike Taylor has been forecasting the weather for five years at Detroit’s ABC affiliate, WXYZ-TV, Channel 7. He is a part of the station’s First Alert Weather team and can be seen on weekends and periodically throughout the weekday. Many viewers may know him from his on-air broadcasting, but some may know him as the dancing weather guy. Taylor has garnered a lot of followers intrigued by his slick moves and style on social media.
In a One-On-One interview with the Michigan Chronicle, Taylor recounts a sunny day and being in a good mood when he decided to video lip sync the song, “Happy Feelings” by Maze featuring Frankie Bravely.
“I was just trying to put some positivity out there on social media,” he said. “I posted this video pretending like I’m singing as if I can and I got over 8,000 [views].” He soon realized this spontaneous and cool Instagram reel was the type of content that drew more people than much of his weather content on his personal accounts.
“I’m a fan of music,” said Taylor. “I used to dance all the time in high school. I was one of those people who dance around at home and practice.
“A lot of my dances are one takes. I’d do one take, see how it looks, and just upload it.”
Those natural dance skills seem to be paying off in his free styling moves and slides and sometimes at work across the studio floor.
The Detroit native is recounts being inspired as a kid watching Michael Jackson do the moon walk and taking the time to himself to be intrigued by all types of dance such as salsa, ball room, ballet and spinning.
“Once I realized people started to like it, I realized I had to shake the dust off these knees,” he says in laughter, as he recounts returning to dance after putting it on pause for years after high school.
Dancing is just one of his skillsets. Being from a town of car manufacturing and love for cool vehicles, he attended Mississippi State University where he initially majored in mechanical engineering. But there had been a severe storm moving over Detroit he had been watching from afar while at school. The concern he had over weather conditions back at home, led him to make a phone call to his mother.
“Clearly you’re into weather, you should probably do that instead,” Mike recalls his mother saying. It was at this point he would change his college major to meteorology in the middle of undergraduate school.
After graduating college, he went to work for multiple news stations across the country over several years. He eventually landed back home and returned to WXYZ-TV, the place where he got his start as an intern.
Mike is inspired by several Detroit TV weathercasters he remembers going up watching, but who stood out the most for him is former WDIV-TV meteorologist Andrew Humphrey.
“The presence of Andrew let me know that, ‘Hey, I can do this too!’” 
“You don’t find many Black meteorologist on TV and that was the beauty of Andrew Humphrey,” he said. “His presence on-air and directly showed kids like me that this isn’t something you can’t do or reach for.”
Taylor finds himself being the one who inspires other kids from Detroit who write him letters or acknowledges his presence and their interest in weather and science.
“When we get bad weather, you could be on-air for hours.” In other words, Mike knows he’ll be on this feet for a long time. It’s on bad weather days he often switches his dress shoes and rock his gym shoes or sneakers for comfort, which don’t typically show on the television green screen.
“No one would know I have the comfort on,” he said. “But then it caught on (in the workplace) where people would ask, ‘what shoes you have on today?’”
And just like in dance, when it comes to shoes, Mike will show up b in style from his Jordan Ones, to Bel Air Jordan 5s, and his Nike weather color waves.
“I have to wear my severe weather shoes and depending how bad the weather is that will depict what type of shoes I wear.”
“He’s got on his radar shoes, it’s going to be a bad day!”, a symbol Taylor is jokingly reminded of by his colleagues of in the newsroom.
When it comes to his love for weather, he understands predicting it and be a reliable source of information for viewers is an important part of his day job.
Dancing and being fascinated by a style of gym shoes has been something he’s had enjoyed since high school and it’s still very much a part of him. And he’s proud to showcase it and all it captures of Mike being himself.
Mike doesn’t find himself needing to fit a mode of what people expect in his role. He finds unexpected ways in which people have reached out to appreciate his forecasts and how dancing puts a smile on their faces.
“I want them (viewers/followers) to see me as a whole,” he says. “I want people to wake up smiling and if it’s because of something I did, then great – that’s really the push.”
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