Home | Blog Index | Blog Archives | Christianity & Faith Essays | Storm Chasing Essays

Wednesday, July 18, 2007 - 6:21PM

Central North Carolina storms

By DAN ROBINSON

Editor/Photographer

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.

The RUC model was suprisingly dead-on in its prediction of storms in central and northeastern North Carolina on Tuesday. The trigger was a combination of outflow boundaries at the surface and an upper-air disturbance to add lift support. The result was nearly continuous thunderstorms over the Raleigh metro from 8:00PM until nearly 2:00AM. As far as photography is concerned, the storms were not very friendly, with the exception of the first cells that passed over downtown. I could not find a clear spot to set up the cameras as I approached the storms along I-40 at Jones Sausage Road. I ended up spending most of the evening at the tall towers along Highway 70 near Clayton. There were a few hits, but all enshrouded in rain and/or low clouds. The lightning was pretty intense, but for the most part inside of a rainy mess.

Here is the first view of storms to the southeast of Raleigh around 7:30PM. These were about 50-70 miles distant and moving away, which provided a spectacular view of a textbook thunderstorms, with anvils and all.

Thunderstorms about 50 miles southeast of Raleigh.

My brother Matt did much better with the storms in downtown Raleigh, catching a few strikes over the skyline as well as the heay rain core enveloping the city - which made it on several national TV networks. Matt's catches can be found at his site at raleighskyline.com.