One of Portland’s best-known weathermen will render his farewell forecast Friday, ending a career with WCSH6-TV that has spanned 25 years.

Kevin Mannix confirmed on social media and in an interview with the Portland Press Herald on Wednesday night that he is planning to leave the station.

Kevin Mannix, WCSH-TV weather forecaster, will leave the Portland station on Friday.

His last forecast – at least in a full-time capacity – will air Friday at noon. Mannix said he will do occasional forecasts for the station, filling in on an as-needed basis.

“Predicting the weather still energizes me,” Mannix said. “It is going to be tough to walk away from this. I’m going to miss it a lot, but I feel equally as passionate about my book.”

Mannix and his wife, Linda Rota, are writing a book about their experiences. In “Weathering Shame,” which is expected to be published in May, Mannix tells how he struggled to overcome the stigma of being raised by an alcoholic father, and Rota describes her personal journey after her mother’s suicide.

Mannix, 63, used social media Wednesday to get the word out that he was leaving the station he joined in 1989. Only fellow weather forecaster Joe Cupo has been at WCSH longer.

“Being your weatherman the last 25 years has been an honor and one heck of a lot of fun. Weather has been my passion, but the time has come to devote more time to a new passion,” Mannix wrote on his Facebook page.

“I will be filling in a bit from time to time so you won’t be rid of me totally,” he wrote.

Mannix’s departure comes just four months after he was moved from WCSH’s top-rated morning news program to the weekday noon weather report. He was moved Oct. 20 to make way for meteorologist Todd Gutner, who started at the station in October after working for seven years at WBZ in Boston.

WCSH News Director Mike Redding said Mannix has achieved a high profile among Mainers. The morning news and weather broadcast, which Mannix did for years, reached a statewide audience stretching from the Maine and New Hampshire border to northern Maine and Canada.

“The entire state knows and loves Kevin,” Redding said. “People grew up with him. It’s a generational thing.”

Forecasting the weather in Maine is a difficult job, Redding said. If you are wrong, there can be a backlash, especially from people whose occupations depend on snowfall forecasts.

“He has endured for 25 years. You have to be a pretty unique person to pull that off,” Redding said.

Mannix said the highlight of his forecasting career may have come during the ice storm of 1998 that left millions of people from New York to Maine without power for days, and in some cases weeks.

“I was one of the few people in the state who had lights,” Mannix recalled. “I kept saying (on camera) that I am sorry there seems to be no end to this.”

But for Mannix, the highlight wasn’t the fact that he did not lose power. It was that he could keep thousands of Mainers informed about the storm and the progress that crews were making to restore power.

“We were the lifeline to a lot of folks,” he said.

Mannix takes pride in his forecasting philosophy, which is to never overstate a weather forecast.

“If I wasn’t sure, I’d say ‘I don’t have a lot of confidence in this forecast.’ I think people ended up respecting me for that,” he said.

Staff Writer Scott Dolan contributed to this report.

Dennis Hoey can be contacted at 791-6365 or at:

dhoey@pressherald.com