Anyone watching WKRN, New Channel 2 morning and afternoon weather, is sure to know Shelby Mac. She is the vivacious blond who has recently been working with Marcus Bagwell in the mornings and also helping out with traffic. A 2021 graduate of Mississippi State University, she majored in Professional Meteorology and minored in Broadcast.
Her day starts when most of us are still sleeping, at 2:00 a.m., and she is at work by 3:00 a.m. to get her weather forecast completed and prepare herself to be camera-ready. Her day ends after the 2:00 p.m. news, on which she is totally in charge of presenting the weather.
When her work is done on the news, she can often be found heading to a school to visit with kids and teach them about meteorology.
“My school visits are so rewarding,” explained Mac. “In the spring, I get to do about three school visits a week. I get to sit down and talk to the kids. I think that is really important. A lot of meteorologists had experiences as children where a meteorologist came to their school, well, a meteorologist never came to my school. So, I think it is so important to expose as many young people as possible. I can say, ‘hey, I’m from Rutherford County and I can show you guys what my job is all about, and if I can do it, you can do it.’”
Born in Murfreesboro, Mac attended Homer Pittard Campus School and then attended both Siegel Middle and High Schools.
The Good Friday Tornados that hit in 2009 are what drew her to become a meteorologist. There were two people who perished as a result of that event, a 30-year-old woman and her nine-week-old daughter. Mac lived near them at the time.
“As a fifth grader I was like, this is scary,” explained Mac. “I figured if I studied weather more and really figured out how it works I would be less scared. Otherwise, I would continue to fear it.”
She didn’t think of being a meteorologist right off, but she watched all the local weather people. Two of those she watched were Davis Nolan and Danielle Breezy. Then, years later, she was able to work with both, before Davis retired in August 2025.
“I just absolutely adore Davis and loved my time learning from him,” she remarked.
As a child, Mac went back and forth between planning to be a meteorologist, owning a bakery or becoming a radiologist.
“Then my stepdad told me I talk too much to be a radiologist,” joked Mac. “And I said, ‘fair, okay’, so I got back to what can I do in science? At that point, weather came back into my brain.”
When it came to college decisions, she toured Mississippi State, Ole Miss and University of Tennessee Knoxville with her mother. While in Starkville checking out Mississippi State, she was told that that school had the number one broadcast meteorology program in the nation.
“Me and my mother were like, ‘oh, yeah,’” said Mac “That’s all it took. I started at Mississippi State and went from there.”
It wasn’t easy. She took calculus 1, calculus 2, calculus 3, differential equations, physics 1, physics 2, chemistry 1 and chemistry 2 before ever getting into her meteorology classes. Those include thermodynamics, forecasting and radar. All the things she now uses in her day-to-day work.
When she goes to visit classrooms, she shares that going through the calculus and other hard classes taught her that it was okay to fail. Just get up and do it again. You have to fail to succeed. You have to just keep striving.
Mac especially loves sharing her story with young women. She shows them that a female can succeed in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). “Once you get the hang of it,” Mac notes, “it’s fun.”
All the things that she uses for her forecasting can almost all be found on the internet, she readily admits. What makes her job important is that she knows where to go looking for the information, and how to use the graphs and charts and models out there to predict the weather.
“Once I make my forecast sheet, I put all the models and all of the information I need into the MAX system,” explained Mac. “It is like a glorified PowerPoint with all the different graphics that I am going to use on the news. I build them all. I focus the forecast according to what is most important to a viewer – current conditions – and then I look forward.”
The charts and graphs she creates are put into the MAX system to be shown on the green screen behind her. In a practicum class in college, she first practiced how to point and how to use the remote control to change the charts while presenting the weather, because when she presents the weather on television, everything she sees is backwards and opposite to what the viewers are seeing. When viewers see radar clips, there is nothing behind her. There is a TV screen in front of her on top of the camera and two TV screens to the side.
“So, anywhere I am looking, I can see myself, but nothing is actually there,” she said. “You have to think about it sometimes.”
When not charting the weather or visiting classrooms, Mac loves to donate her time to non-profits and learn about small local businesses she can spotlight on air.
“The more I can be involved in the better,” added Mac.