Chief Meteorologist Dave Dahl looks back at the biggest storms of his 43-year career at KSTP-TV

Chief Meteorologist Dave Dahl is retiring after 43 years at KSTP-TV. If you remember a bad storm, chances are Dave has told you about it on TV. And believe it or not, he never wanted to be on camera.

"I really wasn’t interested in actually being on TV" he said. "At first I wanted to be a meteorologist. I just wanted to learn about the weather. I went into it for the science. I thought I was never going to show up on camera."

Dave has been there for all the big weather moments. The first for him was a flood that shut down the Minnesota State Fair right after he started in 1977.

"They called it the State Fair flood because it was so incredible. I started at the end of July and by the end of August we had this super flood. It was just one big storm that sat over the State Fair and I believe we got between 7 and 9 inches of rain in just a short 2.5 to 3 hours. Severe flooding."

Chief Meteorologist Dave Dahl is retiring after 43 years at KSTP-TV

Other memorable storms that stand out for Dave were the Har Mar Mall tornado in 1981 and the Halloween blizzard of 1991.

"I was still working the morning newscast and I remember my first forecast for that storm was about 1-3 inches of snow and it just kept on getting heavier. Well, it snowed like crazy, and of course the night of Halloween it had snowed 8 inches before midnight. So we got 8 inches the first night and then we got 16 inches the next day. We ended up with 28.4 inches, the most snow the Twin Cities has ever had from a single storm."

The tornado outbreak that cut a path through north Minneapolis in 2011 also stands out because Chopper 5 pilot Ken Melchior was in the air and gave viewers a great look at what happened. "

We were seeing the rotation and at first we thought it might be straight line winds" he said. "Then all of a sudden we noticed no, this thing is rotating and it’s causing tremendous amount of damage. And we were giving people in its path a little added warning because we knew exactly where it was going."

And as far as Dave’s last moment on TV Wednesday night at 6 p.m.?

"It’s going to be hard. You know it’s a long time, 43 years. And it’s just going to be hard for me to realize that it’s over. So it’s going to be a hard."