Storm Highway by Dan Robinson
Storm chasing, photography and the open roadClick for an important message
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                   Thursday, February 14, 2008 - 4:11PM

Snow's melting, but cold February ahead

By DAN ROBINSON
Editor/Photographer
Important Message 30 Years of Storm Chasing & Photography Dan's YouTube Video Channel Dan's Twitter feed Dan's RSS/XML feed

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

In September of 2025, my work is generating the most income it ever has in my career. Yet, I'm being forced to shut down my successul operation, against my will, due to one cause alone: 95% of that revenue is being stolen by piracy and copyright infringement. 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. Do not be misled by the lies of infringers, anti-copyright activists and organized piracy cartels. This page is a detailed, evidenced account of my battle I had to undertake to just barely stay in business, and eventually could not overcome. It's a problem faced by all of my colleagues and most other creators in the field.

Round 2 of this week's snow event brought a little more than an inch of accumulation through last night. The overnight post-frontal upslope snow actually made the roads worse than the initial sleet/snow band at sunset. I spent another hour at Fort Hill around 2AM, which did become slick - but again no accidents to report. Due to the cold temps (in the low 20s), all the roads became icy at the same time, not just the bridges. This gave everyone on I-64 ample warning of the conditions before they encountered the curve on the bridge. The sun is out today, quickly melting the snow (watch the timelapse from the StormCam). The ground won't stay clear for long. Following a brief warmup over the next couple of days, multiple light snow events and very cold temps are forecast by the models all the way through the end of next week.

By this time of year, I'm usually anxious for spring to start from the lack of thunderstorms. But thanks to last week's quite satisfying chase, I was able to cure the cabin fever (or 'SDS' - "storm deprivation syndrome" as it is called) for a while. My excitement about May and June is somewhat tempered, though. My spring storm season in the Plains is still up in the air, as this may be the first time that I won't have video income to pay for the annual chase. As much as I love the trips out west, I'm not willing to pay a credit card company a bunch of interest money over the next 8 months to do it. I've got some more web design business expansion plans in the works, which may give me the extra boost needed to fund a multi-thousand dollar storm chase expedition. The web business has become good enough that I can now actually make more per hour of work than I did covering weather events - not as much fun, but more practical. Enough so that I should start being able to take more 'leisure storm chase expeditions' by the 2009 season (Lord willing) without worrying about the funding aspect.

About those additional expansion plans - they might involve a little bit of a westward direction. More on that later!

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