Sky over the St. Croix River. (Greg Seitz/St. Croix 360)

Ben Dery grew up watching the storms blow in across Green Lake, near Chisago City. Living on the east side of the 1,800-acre lake as a boy, he loved to see the weather coming in from the west. His curiosity led him into a career as a TV meteorologist, currently working at KARE-11. On March 2, he’ll give a talk in St. Croix Falls about how weather forecasts are created, the future of meteorology, and more.

Dery’s childhood was full of signs he was a future weather forecaster. He says there are photos of him as a boy, standing in a hail storm, wearing an ice cream bucket on his head for a helmet. He found the weather awe-inspiring, and wanted to know how it worked.

“I was always curious. I wanted to know why we only got an inch of snow, but then Forest Lake got a foot and a half, and they don’t have school today,” he recalls.

Eschewing typical kid television programming, he tuned into The Weather Channel. “Other kids were watching cartoons. I was watching ‘Local on the 8s,’” he says, referring to a regular segment on the cable network.

The St. Croix River and its valley were also formative in his love for the outdoors. Dery achieved the rank of Eagle Scout, doing lots of camping at Interstate and William O’Brien State Parks. When he started dating the young woman who would become his wife, Emily, he arranged a surprise dinner at the base of Cascade Falls in Osceola. There was even a white tablecloth.

When Dery headed to St. Cloud State University after high school, he still wasn’t sure how to follow his love for weather in his professional life.

“I didn’t really know how to make a career out of it or if I was going to be any good at it,” he recalls.

A counselor even cautioned him against meteorology, saying it would mean too much math and too much science. But Dery ultimately decided to pursue his passion and got his bachelor’s in meteorology and mass communications. While still in college, he joined the SKYWARN program of the National Weather Service.

“I’d sit on the edge of the city and watch the sky in case it got nasty,” he says.

From there, he got his first job as a morning forecaster for WDIO-TV in Duluth. After a few years, Dery and his growing family made a big geographical leap in 2019, moving to Seattle, where he got a job as a meteorologist on the local NBC affiliate, KING-TV.

Working in the Pacific Northwest, Dery saw the weather doing strange things like Arctic air warming as it crossed the ocean, a cold front actually increasing the ground temperature. He forecasted cap clouds on Mount Rainier, where weather is a big part of skiing and other activities on the mountain.

“This was all stuff that I saw in textbooks, but never in person,” he says.

There was another big difference from Minnesota: the response to snow. Because the region sees snow so infrequently, there is not the infrastructure in place to deal with it. Even a small amount can temporarily grind life to a halt.

“Let’s just say that when there’s an inch of snow forecast in Seattle, the whole city freaks out,” Dery says. “They don’t have a million snowplows like we do.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, Dery’s family decided it was time to head home. They moved back to Minnesota and he joined the meteorology team at KARE-11, where he’s worked ever since.

When he was on paternity leave in 2023, after his second child was born, which was conveniently timed during Minnesota’s early summer storm season, Dery’s own childhood joy in seeing storms re-emerged.

“I did the proverbial Minnesota dad thing where there’s a storm coming in,” he says. “I sat in the garage with the garage door up, just watching storms come in.”

An avid angler, Dery’s love of weather has always played a part in fishing, too. Atmospheric pressure and other factors can have significant effects on fish behavior, while wind can determine where to target. But according to Dery’s dad, his frequent fishing partner, it’s not that complicated, and he often repeats an old angling axiom.

“He just says it’s so easy: when the wind’s in the east, the fishing’s the least,” Dery says. “When the wind’s in the west, fishing is the best.”

Teasing aside, Dery’s dad is also happy to ask his son for a weather forecast on the spot, even while they’re in the boat. “He’ll say, ‘all right, I see that storm over there, how long do we have?’”

On March 2, Dery will bring his passion for weather back to the St. Croix Valley, at a free event at the St. Croix Falls Historic Auditorium. Presented by the volunteer initiative Main Street Voices, the Sunday afternoon program will include an interactive discussion, moderated by Jeff Sauressig, a science teacher at Chisago Lakes High School, Dery’s alma mater.

“[Minnesota] is a great place to live,” Dery says. “We have all four seasons, we run a full gamut of things. We get nasty storms and there’s always something interesting to talk about.”

The event is free, but registration is required — click here to register.