Courtney Crowder

ccrowder@dmreg.com

Much-beloved KCCI-TV Chief Meteorologist John McLaughlin has resigned, according to a Facebook post he wrote late Friday night.

“It has been my true honor to serve the people of central Iowa since I started at KCCI full time in June of 1986,” McLaughlin wrote. “During this time, there was not a single day I did not look forward to coming to work and forecasting Iowa’s chaotic weather.”

McLaughlin, who has been suffering from a respiratory illness for almost a year, had been on leave from the station for months.

“As for my illness, it is a permanent auto immune disease,” he wrote. “My physicians and specialists figured out what caused it. The long term cough so many of you noticed is gone, (but) my body attacking itself has left me with severe fatigue which limits what I can do, and when I can do it. It has robbed me of being productive all day long like I used to be.”

McLaughlin wrote at length about the aptitude of the rest of the Channel 8 weather team including, Kurtis Gertz, Mike Lozano, Jason Parkin, Bryan Karrick, Metinka Slater and Frank Scaglione.

He called the group his “blood brothers and sisters,” adding he “would fight in dark places" with any of them by his side.

McLaughlin also discussed being at the helm of the weather team during a rapid change in the technology surrounding TV meteorology. He wrote he was able to assist in the installation on the first professional TV Doppler radar at KCCI-TV in the 1990s, which allowed for the “live, continuous coverage of severe weather down to street level.”

His love for meteorology was almost tangible throughout the lengthy post.

“This job has always been about serving the public,” McLaughlin wrote. “I didn’t come to work each day to please my employer, or to just earn a paycheck. I did it because I felt that it was my duty to lead a team of dedicated meteorologists to protect the public through advance warning. I took great pride in being on air with a developing tornado or damaging wind storm minutes BEFORE the official warning came out.”

While he may have resigned his post, McLaughlin promised he would fight his disease and “keep getting up” when he got knocked down.

“There have been plenty of knock downs, but never a knock out!” he wrote.