Efren Afante is the Chief Meteorologist at WLTX-TV in Columbia, SC, specializing in impacting weather from tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and severe thunderstorms. He is part of the News19 Weather Team that continues to be the most accurate meteorologist forecasters in The Midlands continuing for over 10 consecutive years.
Efren joined the WLTX Weather team in May 2015 as the weekday morning and noon meteorologist. In may of 2019, after the retirement of South Carolina's Weatherman Jim Gandy, Efren was promoted to Chief Meteorologist. He previously worked at the CBS affiliate in Jackson, Mississippi. He brings his experience of forecasting some of the most complex severe and winter weather in the country. That includes the two strongest tornadoes in May of 2013 in Oklahoma, the April 2014 tornado outbreak in the central U.S., the historic October 2015 South Carolina floods, to name a few.
He graduated from the University of Oklahoma. While there he was an Undergraduate Research Assistant with the Shared Mobile Atmospheric Research and Teaching Radar (SMART-R) Program. Some of that research included The Verification Of Rotation of Tornadoes Experiment 2 (VORTEX2) Project in 2010 and The Deep Convective Clouds and Chemistry (DC3) Project in 2012. He has done extensive research while at OU analyzing hurricanes, tornadoes, severe storms and lightning detection.
You can contact Efren Afante at eafante@wltx.com and follow Efren on Twitter at @EfrenWLTX or on Facebook at Efren-WLTX.