Retiring KCRA meteorologist Mark Finan reflects on 33 years forecasting Sacramento weather

It is the end of an era in Sacramento TV news.

Mark Finan has been the chief meteorologist at KCRA for more than three decades. Since 1991, he has informed viewers of some of the biggest weather events in history — from snowfall, to flooding, heatwaves and devastating wildfires.

After 33 years, he entered a well-deserved chapter on June 14 — retirement.

Mark sat down with CapRadio’s Steve Milne to look back at his career and how he plans to spend his time after KCRA.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Interview Highlights

How does it feel to be retiring?

I'm not really quite sure what’s on the other side. There's a lot to process as I'm going through the last days of KCRA, but I'm looking forward to what's in store for next week and next month and beyond, and planning things that I'll now have time for that I haven't had time for before. So it's a pretty exciting time but it's also a kind of a nervous time, a bit of anxiety entering the unknown after you know, 33 years at KCRA and working at other television stations before that. A work schedule certainly keeps you busy and occupied and suddenly turning that off is a bit of the unknown, but I'm excited about it.

Well, let's go back to the beginning of your career. What sparked your interest in meteorology?

Well, I think I wanted to be a meteorologist since I was about five. A line that popped into my head a couple of weeks ago is I've wanted to be a meteorologist since before I could spell meteorologist. It was just one of those things. When I was a kid, I always was more interested in weather than everybody else around me. I was always curious about the weather, what caused it, what caused our summer thunderstorms. I grew up in New Hampshire and we had summer thunderstorms, we had big snowstorms in the winter. I was always curious about what made them happen, and just looking out the window and seeing it snow and seeing snow drifts pile up, I’d always get very excited about it. Well, my parents weren’t very excited about it, I was. And that has never left me. So when it came time to decide where to go to school and what to study, meteorology seemed like a natural thing.

You grew up on the east coast and New Hampshire. You started your career in Portland, Maine, then Rochester, New York. How did you end up in Sacramento?

Well, they offered me a job! And while I enjoyed the people I worked with and the area that I was in, KCRA is an amazing television station. It is known throughout the industry as being one of the premier television local television stations in the country and when they offered me a job I said yeah, that would be nice to work for a company like that. And it has been so rewarding to work with the men and women there over the course of the years. The faces have changed, the mission has stayed the same and it is rewarding every day to work with professionals like that. And so my decision 33 years ago to move to California and to work at KCRA is one that I'll forever be thankful for. It was a great move.

And what was the biggest challenge in adjusting to the job in Sacramento?

Well, it's one thing to forecast the weather but once you forecast for a specific location, every location has its own little idiosyncrasies, so it took me a while to figure out. I had never really spent much time in Northern California. So figuring out Delta breezes, figuring out how the west slope of the Sierra works, the Tahoe Basin. Just the overall weather patterns that we're used to looking at, how to translate that down into our local weather. And then as time goes on, you further develop that and how the weather is different from Roseville to Auburn and just the small little things. 

While I've been doing this for 33 years here, I still learn things every day and they're still things that surprise me. We had a case this spring where the snow came down about 1,000 feet lower than I thought it would. I still don't know why it happened. That's one of the things I like about weather, is no matter how much we study it, things can still surprise us.

You're a relatively young guy. When did you make the decision to retire? And was it an easy decision or did you kind of struggle with it?

You say I'm relatively young — I appreciate that — but I'm actually paying Medicare. So I'm not that young! I do put a lot of time into work. My normal work day in the office is 1:30 to 11:30 and I do some work in the morning. So it's one of those things that I put a lot of time and energy into and it's the only way I know how to do the job. And while I am still relatively young there are a lot of things I want to do. So the time just seemed right to take the time and energy that I have, to dedicate to the things that I'd like to do a little bit more. 

I do think I'm going to struggle with it a little bit and that's why I still do weather from home in the morning. I do an update in the morning on YouTube and that'll be my outlet. Some people really have found that to be helpful and I find it helpful. It's a different format, and again, another place people are looking for information and you can give some information, so I'll still have that outlet. 

Somebody asked me about it the other day, about leaving, stopping doing weather. I was like, you know, I'm retiring from TV, I'm not retiring from weather. I wanted to be a meteorologist since I was like five and that doesn't change even though it's 60 years later. I'm still going to want to be forecasting the weather and still have that curiosity about weather that I had when I was five years old.