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Monday, June 4, 2007 - 8:00AM EDT

Outbreak setup

By DAN ROBINSON

Editor/Photographer

From Dan: How the crime of copyright infringement took $1 million from me and brought down my business.

I've lost more than $1 million to copyright infringement in the last 15 years, and it's finally brought an end to my professional storm chasing operation. This page is a detailed account of the biggest threat to my photography and video operation that I had to battle daily to just barely survive, and eventually could not overcome. It's a problem facing all of my colleagues as well.

SPC Day 3 outlook for Wednesday

With the Lord's blessing, I have mananged to budget for what I think may be the worst-case scenario for the possible repair bill that my HVAC system might end up needing today. I have enough funds to make the storm chase expedition if it looks like a sure bet at tornadoes - and as it's looked all along, this morning it still appears that way. The parameters for tornadoes Wednesday look the most potent that we've seen all season, and nice southwest flow at 500mb continues on the Plains through the following days.

Wednesday's target is a long way away, in southern South Dakota and northern Nebraska - meaning we might have to take the Route 35 road out of West Virginia up through Indianapolis and Chicago. Those are notoriously high traffic areas, meaning we'll need as much travel time as possible. Providing that the central air system repair doesn't go over budget, we'll plan for a departure early tomorrow morning - which should get us to a preliminary target of Souix Falls in plenty of time.

Based on the current outlook, this probability table charts the chance of our trip starting on a particular date:

2007 Storm Chasing Expedition - Departure Date Probability as of June 4

June 5-10

75%

No trip

25%