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Monday, February 11, 2008 - 1:41PM

Wildfires in NC, VA; Freezing thunderstorms in KS, MO

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.

Strong winds have been fanning large wildfires across Virginia and North Carolina into today. Take a look at this satellite animation of a huge wildfire smoke plume over extreme northeastern North Carolina, near the Dismal Swamp along Route 17 close to the Virginia border:

Notice how the plume shifts as the winds change direction from north to west. Also of interest is the rare use of the 'smoke' METAR observation symbol at the Elizabeth City weather station:

The latest flurry of blog posts reflects the fact that we are in the middle of a very active weather pattern that will be continuing for the forseeable future. The winter storm in the midwest this morning has already produced significant ice accumulations in southwest Missouri, as well as causing accidents into Kansas and Oklahoma. The remarkable thing about the area of freezing rain in Kansas and Missouri this morning is how convective in nature it has been - producing copious amounts of lightning. On radar, the system is no different than a summertime thunderstorm complex - except everything at the surface is ice!

This system is moving our direction, and should begin affecting West Virginia sometime after sunset tonight. While the thunderstorms will likely not make it this far, the freezing rain, sleet and snow will.