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Wednesday, April 7, 2010 - 5:24PM CDT

4/7 chase - southwestern Illinois

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.

With a unidirectional wind profile, veering in the low levels, marginal instability and linear forcing, I didn't expect to see anything today. But it was in my backyard, so I went anyway. I ended up near Nashville, IL before turning around to head home. I saw maybe 5 cloud-to-ground lightning strikes all afternoon, and found no hail in any of the cores (WxWorx algorithm had some 1" and 1.5" markers, but none that I sampled verified). I observed nothing remotely supercellular, just a few high, ragged shelf clouds here and there.

click to enlarge

This should be it for us for a while. Possibly a cold-core storm or two tomorrow to watch out for, since they've happened two days in a row now west of here.