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Monday, July 20, 2009 - 10:50PM

Storms over the Coalfields

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.

HD EXPEDITION VIDEO: Lightning over southern Mingo County, WV

Yes, finally some storm photos for a change - at least I think that's what this site was supposed to be about. A fairly mediocre chase this afternoon, but it was good to see some visible lightning again after nearly a month. I would not have normally driven as far as I did today for storms of this caliber - but with the strong upper level trough over us, we had nice lapse rates (thanks to very unseasonably cold air aloft), some good low-level instability and notable deep-layer directional shear profiles - which brought a small tornado / cold air funnel risk to the region.

I saw nothing of that nature today (funnels or even storm structure). The most active area was down in the southern coalfields, around the Logan/Williamson/Paintsville vicinity. So, the chase route was 119 south to the Kentucky state line - all the way to the tiny Appalachian coal town of Nolan (Mingo County), where I finally gave up on the funnels and set up for lightning along the Norfolk Southern (former N&W) mainline. I ran both HD video and reaction-based stills. Two trains passed in the 25 minutes I was there. I was hoping to get a lightning shot with locomotives - which I actually came within about 8 seconds of getting (watch the video), instead catching the anvil crawler over the passing hopper cars just behind the engines (first image below).

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While most of the discharges I saw were pretty meager, there was one spectacular and complex sky-filler that I missed on the DSLR by a fraction of a second (you can hear the shutter opening too late on the video). I included a slow-motion replay on the video clip that shows the progression of the flash - there is a CG ground connection in the middle of it all. Here are a few grabs from video:

click to enlarge

As this batch of storms faded, another complex of convection fired to the northeast in Nicholas and Fayette counties on what looked like a boundary from earlier activity. They remained fairly stationary through sunset. Since I expected them to die off quickly, I didn't go after them - opting instead to shoot the distant lightning from ridgetops in Boone and Kanawha counties along Route 119 on the way home.